by Ellis Knox
We did not fall into despair, but a grim determination settled over us. I thought only of surviving to the next meal. Escape was a fantasy. Retaliation was madness. At one point, the professor suggested we might be under some external influence that clouded our thoughts, a kind of poison in the food intended to keep prisoners befuddled and therefore docile. No one even tried to debate the suggestion.
When the dürgar came a third time, it was with shining spears. No vat of stinking food accompanied them; instead, full two score dürgar entered, each with a spear that shone brilliant white at its tip. Moving quickly, they herded us together—not against the far wall as before, but at the center of the room. I was sure we were about to be killed, surrounded as we were with weapons.
“Oh, and here they are. Uff, the prize does reek.” The voice spoke in high, fluting tones, on the verge of singing. It came from beyond the circle of blinding light, disembodied. I squinted.
A shape approached, too tall to be dürgar. For a moment, I thought it was human. On the instant, my imagination invented a whole civilization, the true origin of the human race, born in the womb of the planet.
In the next instant, the invention collapsed. The shape came closer and was not human.
He was an elf.
“Come along now. You are bought. Come!”
Bought? I opened my mouth to protest that people are not commodities for sale, but he spoke again, and the ring of spears parted. From the opposite side, dürgar prodded us forward. Cosmas growled low, and Nik whispered, “Easy, now.”
We were getting out of a prison, but somehow entering into the status of a purchase felt no better. Once we moved beyond our captors, the light no longer blinded us, but instead illuminated the elf.
There was no doubt of his species, for his third eye was wide open, a turquoise oval, sightless yet perceiving. Before that unblinking stare I instinctively recoiled, foolish as that sounds. Every childhood story and adult prejudice caused me to turn away, lest he read my mind, cast a spell, or steal my spirit. We have grown accustomed to elvish tact of keeping their True Eye closed; the behavior of this elf shocked me.
He was tall for an elf, nearly as tall as Nik, though with the typical slender build and long hands. His gaunt face gave him a hollow-eyed look, but his mouth curved into what might have been a smile. His eyes narrowed. I could not read him.
“Come with me,” he said in a pleasant voice. “I shall see to your needs.”
I remember his words exactly because they were so odd. He had just bought five prisoners and he would see to our needs?
Not that we had a choice. Not that we would prefer abuse and neglect at the hands of the dürgar. We followed our buyer in a line, as docile as ducklings. To where would we run? For us, the whole of the Second World was a prison without a door.
Do not think we had surrendered. Nik scanned every opening as we passed. Cosmas made a point of walking at his full height. For myself, the struggle continued internally. We would find a way to escape. I would not be defeated by this world. With each step, I became more convinced of the importance of our story. The Surface needed to know about the Second World. At least the dürgar did not follow us.
Nik, too, took note of the fact that only a single drow was with us at the moment. We exchanged a look. He shrugged, I nodded. We might have run then, but to where? At least this man was not pointing a weapon at us. One insoluble crisis at a time, this was the silent message that passed between us.
I turned my attention to the man who was either our liberator or our owner, and only then did I truly see his form and dress. He was a walking art project. He wore a single garment that I might call a dress or a shift, were it worn by a woman. This was worn by a man, a biological fact I could scarcely ignore, given that the garment was nearly sheer.
The robe—it is the best word I can find—shifted in coloration almost step by step. It did not drape over his body the way clothes do, but hung suspended, moving according to some other logic. Its general hue was yellow gold, but it was one shade at the high-collared neck, another at the shoulder, ripples of amber down the back. And so on. The colors somehow highlighted his musculature, hiding and revealing in a most disconcerting way. The result was more exotic than erotic, but the sum would still make a bathhouse keeper blush.
Beneath the translucent play of color were patterns on his skin. I must call them tattoos, though the word is inadequate, for these shapes moved. They covered every inch of his skin, so cunningly formed they seemed to have both depth and dimension. Most shapes were abstract and meaningless to me—glyphs and geometries, some attractive and some repellent. Now and again I thought I could recognize an animal or plant, familiar and alien at the same time, as if they’d been drawn by an ancient Egyptian. Once, a large eye appeared, staring back at me for an unnervingly long time.
This bizarre creature led us through a series of wide, ugly hallways, his corruscations in stark contrast to the featureless, utilitarian, gray halls. None of us spoke. I, for one, feared to do so.
I was so mesmerized by this elf, I scarcely noticed our passage through the dürgar hallways. So it seemed we abruptly passed from our prison to the outside. We came out of the hall and into a street surrounding by buildings, their exteriors as ugly as the interiors. The city of the dürgar was composed of gray blocks piled atop one another to form buildings in the shape of gray blocks. Each building was like a fist rammed into the ground, dark and brutal, to be used but never to be admired. This was Benthamite utilitarianism given shape—function with utter disregard of form. The contrast with the spectacular elf could not have been greater.
“Sir,” Professor Queller called out, “I do beg your pardon, but will you tell us where you are taking us?”
The elf did not look back, but his reply was clear enough. “No.”
He led us to a long, silver carriage, big enough to hold all of us, and motioned us to get in. We five shuffled to a stop, baffled because there were no doors. The entire top of the carriage appeared to be made of glass, for we could see all of the interior. Bench-like seats ran down its middle so that passengers faced outward, back to back. A third bench crossed at the front; this was evidently for the coachman, though none was in evidence. The seats were deep blue, seeming to be formed out of a single block of something. The front was entirely glass. The driver would look directly onto the street.
Doors were not the only missing items on this carriage, if carriage it was. There were no wheels, nor were there horses.
No one else was around. We stood on an empty street, next to a vehicle as mysterious as it was inaccessible.
The elf made a sound that could only be one of impatience. He stepped closer to the coach, and an entire section of it detached and slid back. He did not, as nearly as I could tell, make a gesture or utter a word. I supposed the door mechanism was ensorceled in some manner.
We got in. Cosmas was too tall to fit. We scrambled about awkwardly until he said he would lie down on the one side, while the four of us occupied the other side. Even with the four of us seated comfortably—and the seats were indeed comfortable—there was room for one or two more. The elf got in at the front, and the magic door slid shut. All sounds at once became close. I looked around me. I expected to see a gang of gnomes or dürgar hasten up with a team of horses, to be reprimanded by the elf, but no such thing happened. I imagined wheels would appear by the same magic that operated the door, but that didn’t happen either.
The entire front of the coach was covered with a series of squares, rectangles, a triangle here and there, all showing different colors. I once saw the control panel of a steam engine: dials, meters, gauges, switches, all arranged in a bewildering array that the engineer manipulated as readily as a musician might play an organ. This display was similar in mysterious complexity, but the elf never touched the panel.
Instead, he tapped out a pattern on his left forearm. Some of the colors on the panel glowed in response.
And the ground fell away.
Nik let out a squeal to my right, Bessarion cried a proper shriek, and even Cosmas uttered a low growl of surprise. Professor Queller offered up a full sentence: “Now, this is a bit of a surprise.”
My fingers dug into the cushion. Silly, I know. If something were to go wrong, both I and the coach would fall from the sky.
I have seen balloonists, out in the fields of Champagne on a windless October morning. It was a beautiful sight, even though the two aeronauts perched like birds in a basket, and the balloon itself merely unpainted silk half hidden under a veritable shroud of ropes. Seeing two human beings ascend into the sky had set my heart aflutter; it made me proud of the entire enterprise of Science.
Now, however, I was terrified. Over the next several minutes I managed to move from that emotion to mystified and then overwhelmed, but I never forgot that I was suspended in midair by a device I did not understand, operated by a being I neither knew nor trusted. Fear, I can tell you, is a hindrance to good observation.
The floating carriage quickly left the dark boxes of the dürgar quarter behind and we flew between the towers we had seen from afar. They were even more beautiful seen close up, each glowing like a gigantic candle. Far below, tiny shapes moved. The denizens of the city, or so I guessed. Within the towers I could make out no details at all. There had to have been hundreds or even thousands living inside each, must have been tables and chairs and kitchens and water closets, but all I saw was light, complex and shifting, very much like staring into the flame of a candle. I soon gave it up, and turned instead to my companions.
“Are you doing all right, professor?” I asked. The old man was turning this way and that, peering out windows, inspecting the seats, the metal of the car.
“Perfectly,” he replied, in tones that let me know I’d interrupted. He didn’t ask how I was doing.
“Nik?” I decided to try someone more communicative.
“Foot’s better,” he replied, “but not much else.”
“Were you injured?” our host-and-captor asked. In a human, I would have expected to hear concern, but the sing-song voice made questions and statements all sound alike.
“Sprained the ankle in the shipwreck.”
“In the shipwreck! Oh, that ornaments the story, indeed it does. Be sure to remember that. Much better than being mishandled by the Protectors.”
“If you mean the dürgar, they did their own mishandling,” Nik said.
The ogre grumbled.
Tattoos scurried across the elf’s shoulder. “Is that one agitated?” He pointed at Cosmas.
“He’s fine,” Nik said. “You’re fine, aren’t you, Cosmas?”
The ogre rumbled again and turned to look out the window.
“See? He’s fine.”
Henrik spoke up. “My name is Herr Doktor Professor Henrik Queller, of the University at Rostock. And you are?”
Colors on the robe shifted into richer shades. The elf remained silent for so long I thought he was waiting for more, so I introduced myself as well, going so far as to add I was a reporter for the Augsburg Zeitung. I called myself a reporter, that’s how nervous I was. This man held our lives in his hands, but he was inscrutable, and gaudy as a peacock. Which bird is notoriously ill-tempered.
Nik followed my example, but neither Beso nor Cosmas would speak, so Nik did the honors for them.
“I have seen dwarves,” the elf said when Nik had done, “but not an ogre. A substantial morsel that one, yes.”
I didn’t much like any of us being called a morsel.
“You haven’t told us your name,” Nik said.
I cringed a little, but the elf seemed not to take offense. At least, his robe and tattoos did not suddenly turn fiery.
“I am Moti Okoru Kalut.”
The Tower Golden
“What do you want with us?” Henrik asked.
“I am a drow. I want for nothing.”
“Drow?” Henrik asked. “You are not an elf?”
The professor knew the answer to this. He was trying to draw our captor out a bit.
Colors rippled. “Of course not. Elves belong to your world, human. This world belongs to the drow.”
“Ah,” Henrik said. “The Masters.”
The colors muted.
“And,” the professor added, “dürgar means Protectors, does it not?”
“The whole of the world is divided into three parts,” Kalut said in the tone of one reciting an aphorism, “those who rule, those who fight, and those who labor. Drow, dürgar, gnome. Your world is different.”
“Why did you buy us?” I asked. It was another way of asking what he wanted with us.
“I should think that was obvious.”
“Explain it anyway,” I said.
“No.”
So much for my attempt to steer the conversation. Henrik frowned at me; I think he did not appreciate my attempt.
The car was silent for some time after that. Our flying carriage wove between towers of astonishing colors until it steered directly toward one of amber gold. Darker tones crawled along its length like serpents.
“We arrive,” Kalut said.
We were flying directly at the tower, with no hint of an opening anywhere along its length. We slowed, but still no door or hatchway appeared. We were too close, no time to turn aside. Henrik cried aloud.
The tower swallowed us.
And we stopped. Landed. Arrived in port. What sort of phrase could possibly describe it? We had been outside, arrowing to our doom, then we were inside and motionless, surrounded by a butter-yellow light. The carriage opened and Kalut stepped out, seeming to stand on light, which surrounded us like a heavy fog.
“You will stay a moment. Do not get out.”
He made motions, more complex than before, so swift I could barely follow—a swipe, a twist as of a dial, several taps as if playing a keyboard. He finished by touching his chest with the fingertips of both hands. Where he touched, the fabric of the robe seemed to disappear and he tapped bare flesh, then it reconstituted itself when he lowered his hands again.
“Extraordinary,” Henrik said. “He uses his own body as a control mechanism.”
It was all extraordinary. How did he make fabric appear and disappear? I wondered if the drow’s clothing might be made up of pure light.
We had little time to ponder such questions, for once Kalut lowered his hands, the space around us took on form and substance.
“You may safely exit,” Kalut said.
Nik climbed out first. “Just out of curiosity,” Nik said as the others also got out, “why did we have to wait?”
“If you got out too soon, you would have fallen two hundred and thirty feet, more or less. Then, my petal, you would have died, which would have been a misfortune to me.”
I looked down, half expecting to see some city canyon stretching vertically away, but the floor appeared solid enough. If oak could be the color of honey, I’d have guessed I stood on a fine-grained wood floor. Around us, the formless glow had likewise taken shape. We stood in a large room, mostly occupied by ourselves and the flying car.
I say it was a room, but cave could serve as well, for there were no sharp corners, no right angles anywhere. Even the floor, upon closer inspection, could be seen to slope gently upward. No windows showed, nor doors, nor furnishings.
“This way,” Kalut said, and set off toward one wall. As he approached, an opening appeared. No door, just an opening. What had been wall became a doorway as if part of the wall dissolved upon command. It made me think of Kalut’s robe and how parts of that also disappeared and reappeared, seemingly on command.
“I see why they’re the Masters,” I said, not meaning to say it aloud.
“Of course,” Kalut said. “It is the proper order of the world.”
“And where do we fit into your proper order?” Nik asked. It was more of a challenge than a question.
“You are barbarians,” Kalut said. “You will stop asking questions now. It is impolite, unt
il invited to do so.”
Nik started to respond. Without thinking, I touched him on the back. He turned on me fiercely. The anger I heard in his voice showed on his face.
“Not now, Niki,” Henrik said gently. “Now is the time to be careful.”
I smiled at the professor to show I appreciated the help. He nodded in reply.
The same wheat-honey-dandelion colors ran through the rest of the tower. Our doorway had brought us first through a hall then into another room of curves, but this one appeared to be more residential. At least there were places to sit.
“Do not sit,” Kalut said. I stopped myself in mid movement. My legs complained that they were tired and wanted rest.
“I bought you to give me advantage,” Kalut said, as if continuing our conversation from before. His tattoos settled into a series of patterns and did not shift.
I still hadn’t found a place to rest my eyes. I couldn’t look at his face because of that awful, unblinking eye. I couldn’t look farther down without embarrassment, for the drow’s body was less concealed that that of an oriental dancer. I tried looking past him, but we humans are accustomed to looking at each other when conversing. All I could do was glance, then look away. Repeatedly.
“What advantage?” I asked.
“Over Agedat. Did you not speak with the Fournier?”
“I did,” Henrik said. “He said he’d been, er, acquired by someone. Agedan, or some such.”
“Agedat,” Kalut amended. “And Marde, naturally. He of Tower Green, she of Tower Red, though these are clumsy words. Your language has so few words!”
His garment ran through a dazzling array of colors, all somewhere in the range of yellow to gold to amber. Ripples, bars, dots, every inch a different shade or brilliance. This went on for a full minute or longer.
“We have names for each,” the drow said, and the robe settled into a warm gold, nearly opaque.
“Would you mind holding your clothing to just that color?” I asked.
“Property does not dictate propriety,” Kalut said, and the robe became so transparent, Henrik gasped aloud.
