by Greg Curtis
“How many more?” A noble woman with an expensive looking fur wrapped around her neck asked, looking worried.
“I don't know Lady.” He nodded to her. “I'm sorry. There is only one human world. Althern. But there are four words of giants. Four worlds of elves. A couple of worlds of the sylph. The dwarves and the dryads have only one world apiece. So do the sprites. Then there are goblins and trolls – I'm not sure how many worlds they have. There are probably others. So maybe, twenty times as many people from other worlds as there are humans?” He didn't know. He'd never even considered the matter. And he'd never visited any of those other worlds. He didn't know how large they were or how many people they had. The only world he'd been to other than Althern was Prima.
“Twenty?” She stared at him, aghast at the idea.
“Maybe?” He shrugged helplessly. “Maybe more. I don't know. I don't think anyone's ever counted.”
“All these people to become a part of Ruttland?”
“Oh!” Chy was taken aback by the idea. He hadn't considered that, and neither he guessed, had anyone else. But his visitors and their masters needed to. “With respect Lady, there may not be a Ruttland by the time this is done.”
He saw her recoil in shock when he said that, and he almost wished he had kept quiet. But it was the truth, and these people surely had to know it. So he carried on.
“As the worlds merge, as pieces of them join, the rest of the world spreads out wider. Ruttland will become far larger in physical size than it is now, and there will likely be whole new cities and towns within its embrace, and they will not be part of Ruttland. They will all have their own forms of rule. Kingdoms, realms, lands – all will be mixed up. Like a child's puzzle box with all the pieces put together differently.”
“Other Kings?” Another nobleman asked, sounding upset. That was not good when he too had a brace of pistols on his hip even if he was dressed in a more typical suit.
“Few kings and queens Sir.” Chy nodded politely to the man. “But many other forms of rule. The sun elves and the copper elves have a mixture of noble lineages and elected town governments. It's very confusing and I don't know how it works. The wood elves have something they call a rule of shadows. A sort of secret governance, that they themselves cannot explain. At least not to me. And the high elves have assemblies, which are like guilds that come together.”
“The dryads across the road have circles – in essence gatherings of the oldest and most respected. And they have circles for everything. Some for trades and various guilds. Some for family. Some for magic and knowledge. The dwarves have clanholds and clan leaders – each is a fortress city and some surrounding towns presided over by the strongest warlord. And all of them are in various states of wars and truces. Goblins and trolls mostly live in tribes and so have chiefs. The rest I don't know.”
“And that truly is a sorry thing to admit,” Adrine commented as she unexpectedly walked out of his home. “You humans need to work on your education.”
Chy jumped. So did everyone else. They hadn't known she was there. And when he settled down he still wasn't completely sure how to respond to her words. But by the looks of things his visitors were even less sure of how to react to a woman with mottled skin and jagged ears. Not to mention twigs in her hair.
Meanwhile he was wondering why she was in his house – until he noticed the laundry on the lines and realised that the wood under the copper had been stacked ready for him to light. There was smoke coming from the chimney too. And he supposed he couldn't complain.
He'd given the dryads permission to use his home and his land as they needed while they continued building their own village. It was a practical arrangement. He didn't have time to carry out the normal routines of his life, and they needed help as they set about rebuilding their new home. So he was running around fixing problems all day and they were tending to his vegetable garden, running his stone polishing business, looking after the animals and the orchard and even cooking him meals. And it wasn't as if there was a lot of choice. He couldn't simply abandon them when they were strangers in this land. A man had a duty of care to his neighbours. But really he wasn't complaining. Besides, he still worried that the Inquisitor or another of his ilk might pay him a visit, weapons in hand. He had enemies. But few would dare bother the magic folk as they were called.
“And you've ruined another coat!” Adrine continued, before grabbing the oar and pushing the ruined coat into the water to start washing it.
“There were flying snakes,” he mumbled at her somewhat shame faced. “They spat acid. I'll buy another coat in the morning.”
“Totar,” Lialle De Clara announced unexpectedly as she walked into the yard. “Horrid little creatures, but as long as you don't get the venom in your eyes or mouth, not too deadly.”
“I wasn't planning on doing that,” he replied dryly, wondering why she was there. And then he noticed movement in the distant trees and became aware of the sound of tools and understood. Apparently they'd moved camp and were starting construction of a village nearby. Apparently he was getting more neighbours.
Why, he wondered? It had been odd when the dryads had moved in across the road. But he'd had no problem with them becoming his neighbours. And he still had none. But now sun elves as well? Was there something going on that he didn't know about? Some reason his home was so popular? But he supposed that this wasn't the time to ask.
“Sirs and Ladies,” Chy began, suddenly remembering his manners, “may I introduce Lady Lialle De Clara of the Clara Lineage and Adrine of the Circle across the road.” He'd thought he should probably say something before his visitors' mouths dropped any lower. The problem was that once he'd finished with the introductions, he didn't know what to say next. It was his turn for his mouth to hang open and empty.
Luckily he didn't have to say anything as the two women took over, completing their introductions and putting the visitors on their back feet. It seemed that the two of them were far more adept at conversing with important people than he was. Which allowed him to back away,take the oar from Adrine and continue with his laundry. No one seemed to care. Especially when Drylass the hill giant turned up on his portal having been called, and immediately started telling the visitors about the progress they were making in dealing with the ongoing disaster.
Thirty minutes later they were all sitting on his patio, drinking warm beverages as the sun went down, while he was pinning his third great coat to the line and wondering how many more he was going to need. He was also wondering if he should join them – but it seemed like a foolish thing to do. They seemed happy and there was little he could add to whatever was being discussed. So he went to sit on a tree stump and join the goats instead. They were easier to talk to. And besides, he would only be in the way.
But that left him with a new question – though probably not an important one in the scheme of things. There were six goats now. Where had the other three come from? But at least they were friendly. And they didn't care about anything he said. You could trust a goat, he thought. Except that they kept eating his bushes.
Then they started grunting.
Chy turned around, surprised by the sound, only to discover that it wasn't the goats at all. Instead he was staring at a pig – with wings.
“Oh piss! Not you again!” The winged boar had returned! It took all Chy had not to just start yelling at the beast. But somehow he managed it, choosing to groan instead. The nobles would have heard him.
But the boar seemed to welcome that and unexpectedly she trotted the last few paces between them and then dropped her head, complete with razor sharp tusks, in his lap and grunted a little more. The beast had seen the goats receive his attention and now she wanted to have her head scratched too!
“Shite!” Chy moaned quietly, and then started scratching her head without thinking. “Just don't drool on me!” But he knew she would. She drooled everywhere! Just as he knew his visitors were all looking at him petting a winged pig and wondering abou
t his sanity.
The ruination of his life and especially his reputation was complete – and probably the destruction of more of his clothes.
Chapter Thirty Two
“No, I understand that,” Elodie corrected the golem elf. She'd decided that that was the best way to describe the thrones. Though they weren't really golems – or elves either. She wasn't sure what they were. And they weren't clear on the matter themselves. But what else could they be? She couldn't call them thrones. “What I don't understand was why it was done.”
But that was only the beginning of her ignorance. A bigger question perhaps was when it had been done.
The golems had no idea how long ago the ancients had divided the world up into pieces. It could have been thousands of years ago. It could have been millions. And while they knew what had been done – more or less – they didn't know how either. Nor did they know what had happened to the ancients thereafter.
“It was necessary,” Dimension told her. The throne or the golem still looked like a perfect elf, but now she showed the mark of her magic on her shoulder. Maybe she always had, Elodie wasn't sure. “There was a crisis.”
“But you don't know what that crisis was.” Elodie really didn't even have to ask. And she wasn't surprised when she saw the perfect elven woman with the mark of the snake eating its own tail on her shoulder, shake her head expressionlessly. They all did that. They obeyed their instructions, but other than that they would do nothing of their own accord. And whether things were for good or ill, it didn't affect them.
Was the woman alive? Were any of them? Elodie wondered about that for the thousandth time. She couldn't decide. Not even now that she could speak with them without the danger of them tearing into her thoughts. She'd told them not to and they'd agreed to her demands. They'd recognised her right to give them orders.
But what were they? If they weren't alive, they were an incredible imitation of living people. They were even warm to the touch. And if they were alive how could they be stone? Like the thrones they actually were? And where were their emotions? They didn't have much in the way of feelings.
Maybe the humans with their endless steam powered machines would understand the thrones better she thought. Or the dwarves. Not that the thrones looked like machines or had steam and smoke coming out of their chimneys. They looked like living people – just without a flaw and made of flesh coloured stone.
“And you can't find out.” Elodie wanted to bury her face in her hands but resisted the urge. “Not even Time can unravel the mystery.”
“No his sight is limited,” Dimension agreed. “He cannot go back to the time before he existed.”
Elodie nodded. It was a strange limitation she thought – and an inconvenient one. But it was also a contrived one, she suspected. Someone when they had built the thrones, had not wanted them to know why they had been built. Or why the world had been chopped up into little pieces. Or fairly much anything else that might have been useful.
Some days she suspected the humans were right. There was a Great Beast out there. And he or it had had a hand in creating the thrones. Maybe in the hope that one day this very disaster would unfold, and she would be left trying to unravel an ancient mystery with the thrones' help while waiting for the world to end.
Except that now she knew it wouldn't do that – probably. The world it seemed, wasn't actually being reassembled into new shapes after all. It wasn't actually changing at all. Though she had been struggling with that understanding for a week already, and she still couldn't quite believe it. Thankfully though, there were other, smarter minds out there who would make more sense of what was nonsensical. Ones who would understand what was written in the books she was going to send them.
The sprites had made a critical mistake in stealing the books. Actually they had made a great many mistakes including the fact that they had thought they would be unaffected by what they were doing. Unfortunately for them, that hadn't been the case and N'Diel was suffering the same as everywhere else – while trying to deny that they were responsible to anyone who asked. Sprites kept being taken like everyone else and arriving in other worlds. And when they got there, they had to find their way home. Though most of them just stood around and pined for their paradise.
But the mistake that was going to trap them and maybe save everyone else was the fact that they thought they had the only books. That no one knew what they knew. It was just a shame really, that the thrones had complete copies of everything that had been in that library stored in their thoughts and the library had a catalogue. They could work out every book that had gone missing and could reproduce every word that had been written in them exactly. Though maybe the true shame was that she suspected that most of those who read them were going to be just as dumbfounded as she had been when the golem elves had explained it.
Except that maybe people shouldn't be. In hindsight what had been done was almost logical. Chopping up a world into thousands or millions or even more little pieces and making them into hundreds of other smaller worlds was impossible. If nothing else, it would destroy everything. Turn the worlds into dust and kill everything that lived on them. So of course the ancients hadn't actually done that – even though it appeared that they had.
What they'd actually done was far more tricky. They'd simply walled off sections of the world exactly like the pieces in Chy's puzzle box and then rearranged the ways they connected to one another. It was still almost impossible. Just not completely.
It was like taking a house with lots of rooms and replacing the doors between rooms with portals. Then making it so that when you stepped out of the kitchen you no longer walked into the living room, instead you walked into one of the bed-chambers. While the living room connected to the bathroom. And because the portals didn't allow light to travel normally either, the people in one part of the house had no idea that there was another part of the house right next to them. In that way you divided up one house into two halves that didn't seem to be connected to one another even if they were right next to them and all part of the same house. It was ingenious. And it was madness. And now it was falling apart.
Now thanks to the sprites, those portal walls that divided up the world into pieces, were failing. And while everyone thought that new pieces of other worlds were somehow being inserted back into the world, they weren't. With the portal walls failing, people could suddenly see into and enter the parts of the world that had always been right next to them. They could cross into them, without even knowing they were doing so. And then when they arrived in the new world, they kept thinking they'd somehow been spirited across the worlds instead of simply having walked a few paces across an unseen barrier.
All of that she understood. And it was good that the world wasn't going to be destroyed. The portal walls were just going to slowly fail and eventually the world would be as it always had been. There would be problems of course. Where the portal walls had been, there were vast magical reservoirs of power, all of which were being released. So you got skies that turned yellow and thunder and more. To make it worse, over however many thousands of years or more that the world had been like this, it had changed. Some of the pieces had grown and reshaped themselves. Mountains had risen in places. Valleys and lakes had arrived in others. And when the portal walls failed and the water from one part of the house met the molten fury of another, you got explosions. You got rivers of lava, geysers and eruptions. And then of course whatever had been on the other sides of those portal walls was now free to cross over.
So the world wasn't going to end. It was simply going to once more become the world it had always been. But that was still going to cost endless lives. It was going to destroy realms. Scatter people far and wide. And eventually those who did survive, were going to have to rebuild in an entirely new world. There would be battles, maybe even wars. Dangerous nightmares unleashed upon unprepared peoples. And of course, unknown numbers of people desperately trying to find their way home, back to places that might well h
ave been destroyed and scattered. It was a disaster gradually unfolding. But still survival was possible.
It was also good to know that the void surrounding the volcano wasn't actually expanding outwards and slowly swallowing up the world as she had thought. It was actually a portal wall itself, designed she suspected, to cut the Heartfire off from the rest of the world. On one side was the Heartfire and on the other lay the void. With it in place the only way to and from the Heartfire had been through the grand portal or the road, both of which linked to the now missing terrace.
The question was, why had the portal wall been raised? Why had the sprites done that? And before them why had the ancients created the portal walls? Or any of the deception? Even if you had a reason to chop the world up into separate quarters that people couldn't travel to, why make it so that they couldn't even see those separate quarters? Why make them believe that they were separate worlds?
But one thing was clear to her. No matter how powerful the ancients had been, there was no way that they would have undertaken such a radical transformation of a world lightly. They had to have had a reason. Something that had driven them to take this step. Something that she feared smacked of desperation. And now with the portal walls failing, whatever they'd tried to stop by creating this madness, was likely to happen.
