Expedition- Summerlands

by Nathaniel Webb

  I had to look away as the other pair of elves came at Cass and me. Cass loosed an arrow at them. With a flick of his sword, one of the elves cut it out of the air. Cass’s mouth hung open as we watched the two halves of the arrow spin away to either side of the advancing swordsmen. She stood as still as if she’d been enchanted, a new arrow dangling from one hand and her bow held limply in the other.

  The copper piece was still rolling over my fingers, almost under its own power, and I suddenly realized that it was blazing hot. The elves raised their blades for a dual slash at Cass, and I flicked the coin at them, hoping to force them back with the explosion even if I didn’t hurt them outright. It whistled past Cass’s shoulder, making a red smear across my vision.

  Then it stopped, hanging in midair.

  The swordsmen split around the frozen coin and came back together as Cass raised her bow in a desperate attempt to stop the coming swords, which chopped the bow into three pieces and swept down to bite through her leather armor, cutting deep into both shoulders. Cass dropped to her knees, her eyes wide, her mouth moving in silent shock.

  I put my hands up, trying to show that they were empty, but one elf wrenched his sword from Cass’s shoulder and swept towards me, raising his weapon. I dropped to my knees and ducked my head behind my raised arms as the sword came down. It bit into my right arm with a thwack and hit bone. There was a flash of cold, and then a searing burn like a line of lightning as blood ran down to drip off my elbows. Tears blurred my vision as the elf raised his sword again, spraying blood in the sunlight.

  The commander barked a single, sharp word and the swordsman lowered his weapon. I crumpled over, holding my shattered arm. From my bed on the stone I could see Magpie on his knees; one elf stood with a sword at his throat as the other disarmed Noah with a flickering twist, sending his sword spinning to skitter across the ground a few yards away.

  Beyond the boys, the two commanding elves stood watching the fight with impassive faces. The elf in the golden vest had his left hand up with two fingers raised, then made a flicking motion as though shooing a fly or brushing dust from his shoulder. My paralyzed coin flew off to one side and burst harmlessly in the distance.

  After that, it was just a matter of mop-up. Cass was conscious, but her face was pale and she couldn’t stand under her own power. Two elves hauled her to the center of camp and dumped her on the stone, where she sat slumped to one side, breathing shallowly. They tied the rest of us up with slender rope that bit into my wrists as they pulled it tight and looped it around my upper arms until I could hardly breathe, let alone act. My ruined right arm hung dripping at my side.

  They sat us near Cass, then ignored us as they set about catching our hovering drones with nets of the same tough material as the rope. As they dragged the buzzing machines to the ground, I thought they would smash them, but instead they tied them all up into a sack and tossed them into the commanders’ tent.

  I felt a hollow blossom of loss in my chest as I watched my drone disappear. It was my lifeline to the outside world, but more than that, I’d grown sort of attached to the little thing. It had been a faithful companion through all the madness of the last month, and if not for its camera, Hearthammer would still have been scraping for coins with the other adventurers in Wellpoint, hoping to make enough for food and shelter and wondering how we could afford to send any home to Keats. In my pain-wracked state, the loss of the drone felt as momentous as Jason’s death, and I sobbed openly.

  After a few self-pitying minutes, I tried to rally my smeared senses. If only we could survive this, I told myself, we’d be okay. I didn’t need Noah to tell me that the ratings on our little scrap with the elves, however terrible it had been, would be through the roof. Our discovery would change everything; we just had to make it home to reap the rewards. That the elves hadn’t killed us outright was surely a good sign; the only reason my head was still attached to my body was that the one in charge had reined in his warrior. And hadn’t the commander almost seemed like he would have preferred a conversation to a fight…?

  The soldiers came back for us eventually, yanking us roughly to our feet and indicating that we should start walking away from the Wall, deeper into the unknown. I felt a wave of exhaustion crash over me, but came out from under it suddenly as Cass lost her balance and stumbled into me, sending a sharp lance of pain up my arm. It was all I could do to keep my feet as she slumped against my shoulder. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face as white as a skull, and her voice barely a whisper.

  “Good job, superstar.”

  The elves detailed to help her along grabbed her and pulled her away. I glanced around and realized Noah and Magpie were gone, and as I watched, Cass was dragged off in one direction as prodding swords forced me to go another. Stripped of our weapons and gear, relieved of our drones, battered and bloodied and defeated, we were now being separated.

  The Black Candle

  “At least they gave you a candle,” Jason said.

  “Two would have been nice,” I whispered. There was just one candle in my cell, and otherwise it was darkness. I’d stared at the tiny, flickering flame for so long that it was burned into my vision. I saw it when I closed my eyes, a white smear against black, and when I slept I dreamed of it.

  “How much has it burned down?” Jason asked. He stood over me, visible despite my blindness.

  “Stop asking me that.” I rolled onto my side to face the wall. “I don’t know how long candles are supposed to burn, I don’t know how tall it is, and I don’t know how long I’ve been here.”

  “Don’t get mad.” Jason knelt and put a hand on my cheek, but I couldn’t feel it. “You’re burning up.”

  “They made us walk…” I paused as a violent shiver racked my body. My shirt and breeches, the only things the elves had left me with, were damp with sweat. “They made us walk for a day. To their war camp. My arm hurts.”

  “What did it look like?” Jason whispered.

  “My arm?”

  “No, Emma. The war camp. Describe it to me.”

  I took a long breath, finding the strength to speak. “Big. So big. It filled the whole valley. Lines of… of tents, all different colors. And so many campfires in the dusk.”

  “That’s bad,” Jason said.

  “What’s happening?” I rolled back to look at Jason, who crouched over me. He looked just as he had on the day he’d died, but his eyes were hollow. “It’s off the rails. Why?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I made them go over the Wall,” I whispered. “I could have told Dave Davies no. I should have…” I laughed wheezily, but it turned into a cough. “…said I’d sue. Breach of contract.”

  “Good luck finding a lawyer in the Summerlands.” Jason smiled.

  “Okay. Okay. But it was my idea to go to the Wall. Getting viewers instead of treasure.”

  “The party agreed.”

  “My idea. Starting with my mistake. I gave Dr Agony everything.”

  “Cass was mad,” Jason agreed. “She’s party leader, after all.”

  “Not me,” I said.

  “Not you.”

  I lay shivering in silence for a while, watching Jason pace the confines of the cell. He paused at the candle, which burned with a still, straight flame.

  “Starting with my mistake.” My voice sounded far away even in my own ears.

  “You said that.” Jason turned away from the candle, but it wasn’t Jason, it was Jamie Bullard, the hunting knife in one white-knuckled hand, the other reaching out to take my paycard. “You got me in a lot of trouble. You should have kept your mouth shut.”

  He kneeled in front of my face, Jason again. “You should have kept your mouth shut. Porter found me because you made me come to the police station. He was hired to kill me and you helped him do it. Why?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why did he kill me?”

  “The file Terra sent you.”

  “Why?”

  The door opened wit
h a click, and I flinched away from the light. A blurred shadow with long ears placed something on the floor of the cell, then paused as it straightened up. I blinked away tears and the scene swam into focus long enough for me to understand that he had stopped to look at the candle. It was tall, the length of my forearm, and jet black. The elf glanced from the candle to me, then shut the door.

  In the returned darkness I felt my way over to the bowl of food the elf had put down. There were no utensils, so I touched it gingerly and found my fingers in a lukewarm sort of porridge. I shoveled a handful into my mouth, then realized I had no appetite at all and let it slop back into the bowl. I set the bowl down and returned to watching the candle, alone.

  ***

  Jason never came back.

  The same elf brought me food every so often. I thought he was coming twice a day, but that was little better than a guess. Each time, he would check the candle and glance at me before shutting the door. I was no threat, that was obvious, and no escape risk. I forced myself to eat, but my arm was still ruined, and my fever hadn’t broken. The candle, though, it was burning down, slowly but surely. It was a bit lower every time my captor checked it, a bit more misshapen with dripping wax. There was a sense of impending doom about the black candle, as though it were counting down to something terrible that would occur when it finally gave up and died.

  On one visit, I tried to start a conversation. My voice was raw and whispery as I asked where I was, how long it had been, why I was being held like this. The elf only shook his head and said something in his own musical tongue.

  I thought back to my first public lecture, when I’d said we were all speaking Elvish to each other. Obviously it was some magical effect of the Summerlands, but there was a real biting irony to the fact that while I could communicate flawlessly with somebody who’d grown up speaking Icelandic or Greek or anything else from Earth, Elvish itself remained as alien and incomprehensible as ever.

  ***

  I kept my eyes shut as the door opened. I’d learned to recognize the scrape of the lock, the scuffle of feet in the hallway beyond, and knew better than to let the light dazzle me and start tears in my eyes again.

  So I jolted painfully in surprise when something touched my shoulder. It was a gentle touch by a warm hand, accompanied by something murmured in Elvish. That wasn’t the voice of the elf who’d been bringing me food, though; it was new yet familiar.

  I opened my eyes. Looming over me was the outline of an elf crouched before me, silhouetted against the flame of a torch stuck in the dirt floor of my cell. Behind him sat a leather case about the size of a shoebox. As my vision cleared and my eyes adjusted, I realized he was the elf who’d commanded the camp we’d stumbled on just beyond the Wall.

  He said something and touched my arm, the shattered one. He obviously wanted to examine it. I inched my way up into a sitting position with my back against the wall across from the door, then straightened my arm in a moment of teeth-gritting pain.

  The elf nodded, his eyes on mine, then bowed his head and began to examine my wound. His concern was obvious, a human expression on alien features. In the torchlight, I could see that the gash was badly infected. There was a white flash as he prodded the cut gently and I bit my lip to keep from swooning when I realized I was looking at my own exposed bone.

  The elf caught my eye and pointed to the black-and-purple flesh of the infection. He made a short chopping motion with his hand, which I interpreted to mean that he wanted to cut away the infected flesh. I forced myself to nod, hoping that my face didn’t show the sick fear welling up in my stomach.

  He drew a slender wand of purple heartwood from his belt and pointed it at my arm, which he still had clamped in his other hand. His eyes flickered up to catch mine for one last affirmation that I understood what was about to happen.

  “Cleave,” he said.

  A line of magic cut into my arm like an invisible scalpel, slicing away the throbbing necrotic flesh. I hissed in pain and shut my eyes, searching my mind for anything to think of but the meat falling away in black chunks from my wound.

  My thoughts clamped onto a single word, which I had just heard spoken. Cleave. It was the same spell Noah had cast when we were fighting the hitmen at the bridge, and then as now, I’d understood the word. It wasn’t like speaking English on Earth, and it wasn’t like hearing Magpie speak Greek here in the Summerlands. It was Elvish, in its original, unaltered, unmagicked form.

  Understanding went off in my head like a camera flash. It made no sense at all, and yet, at the same time, under the illogical laws of magic it made absolutely perfect sense. I had gotten so close to the truth in my lecture.

  In the Summerlands, every spoken language became Elvish and from there, became understood. Whatever deep magic worked this miracle was clearly for benefit of the denizens of the Summerlands, who spoke Elvish already… any language put into the black box of the spell would come out handily translated, except Elvish itself!

  And yet all this time, all these weeks, I’d been hearing Elvish spoken day in and day out by everyone I met. Sure, it had been translated before it hit my brain, but the words underlying the ideas were all in the language of the Summerlands. I’d never had to pay attention, never had to care, but the words had been there all along. Which meant they were somewhere in the hazy blue ocean of my memory, if only I could fish them out. I had to start small, with something simple, something I’d heard plenty of times. If I could hook onto that, I might be able to pull up the whole lexicon.

  “Eme Linnaea as,” I said. I am Linnaea.

  The elf looked up, his eyes wide, his arched brows high. The hand with the wand froze, and his grip on my arm tightened.

  “Emeas Scytri,” he said. The verb form was different, but it was obviously just a variant. I am… a doctor? No, it had to be a proper noun, his name. I am Scytri.

  I glanced down at my arm. Not only was the infection gone, but the gash as well. The skin was tight and shiny, as though he’d closed a tear in a lump of clay by smoothing it with his thumb.

  “Atka… atka as ven.” That was thank you, or something like it. Scytri laughed, a genuine sound accompanied by a genuine smile. Something I’d said was funny to him, but he wasn’t laughing at me. He tucked away his wand and held up his right hand, palm facing me.

  “It is my duty to help,” he said, using a phrasing I’d thought was just you’re welcome but was clearly something more complicated. “The work”—work? duty? healing?—“is done.”

  “I am glad you understand me,” I said, though it took me the better part of a minute to put the sentence together.

  “We always understood you.” Scytri smiled. “You did not understand us.”

  “Magic makes you understand?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “But magic does not work the same for your people.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Why did you attack us?”

  Scytri looked away. “We had to. I regret it.”

  “I do, too,” I said. “We don’t want to fight you.”

  There was a long silence as Scytri sat back on his haunches regarding me.

  “What is the candle?” I finally asked. Scytri glanced back at the black candle, which was still burning and looked to have lost about two thirds of its height.

  “An implement of judgment and asteri,” he said.

  “Asteri?” I echoed, shaking my head. I didn’t recognize the word. Scytri’s brow furrowed.

  “A time for thought,” he said at last. “To consider what you have done wrong and, if you want to, to repent.”

  “When the candle burns down, the time is up?”

  “Yes.” Scytri nodded. “And then you are taken to the Eldest for judgment.”

  We lapsed into silence again. It felt stingingly unfair that I should be judged for doing nothing wrong. Things had gone so horribly askew that I found my mind sliding away from any contemplation of what that judgment might mean for me and my friends, if they were even still alive. I f
ound myself in sudden desperate need of small-talk.

  “What do your people call yourselves?” I asked.

  “We call ourselves people,” Scytri said, using the same word I had. “Why? What do you call yourselves?”

  “People,” I admitted. Scytri laughed. “Or humans, maybe that’s better. We call you elves.”

  “What does it mean?” Scytri asked.

  I blinked. I’d never really thought about it before. “It’s an old word in our language. Elves are… creatures like people, but magical.”

  “Do they look like us?”

  “Well, they’re not real,” I said. “They’re…” I had no idea what the word for mythical was, or legendary, or imaginary. “They weren’t real until we found the Summerlands. We thought we were alone.”

  “So did we, until your people came.” Scytri shook his head. “My children would be amazed to learn that I’m speaking with a human.”

  “Children?” I repeated.

  “Yes.” Scytri raised his chin, a proud motion. “Two sons. I haven’t seen them in a year, since I was sent to the Wall.”

  “You must miss them,” I said. Scytri’s eyes were shadowed in the torchlight, and I thought suddenly of Keats and the tired smile he wore whenever the topic of his single fatherhood came up.

  Behind Scytri, the door swung open, almost clipping the torch he’d stuck into the ground. In the light from the hall stood the elf in the long golden vest who’d been there when Scytri’s men attacked us. He raised his right hand, with the back facing Scytri.