Elfland

by Freda Warrington

  It was Matthew; no mask, no jacket, collar undone. He looked annoyed, and somewhat the worse for beer. “What were you doing in there?”

  “I don’t know, I just walked in.”

  “Where’s Lucas?”

  “No idea.”

  “For god’s sake, couldn’t you watch him instead of skipping off with your girlfriends? Come on, back to the party.”

  She jerked free. “Why shouldn’t I have been in there?”

  “Because . . .” He pushed his hand through his hair. “You’re too young. You should be mixing with people your own age, not that crowd.”

  “Matt, were you in there? Did you hear what was said?”

  He sighed through his teeth. “Yes, most of it. I knew we shouldn’t have come.”

  “I have to ask Dad about it.”

  “No, you don’t.” He grabbed her arm and pushed her into an alcove. His fervency alarmed her. “No, Rosie, you will not be asking Dad anything. Keep quiet.”

  “You tell me, then,” she said, defiant. “What’s going on? What Gates?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “Why? Because I’m too young to understand?”

  “No,” he said, groaning in exasperation. “Because it’s not what I want for us, Rosie. This Otherworld business, it’s living in the past, it messes with your head. I mean, look at them, getting agitated in there when they could be concentrating on the real world. I told Dad, I want nothing to do with it and I never have. It sucks you in, wrecks your head with mad dreams and then spits you out. I don’t want you and Luc to go through that.”

  “Have you finished?” she said, shaken to the bone.

  “I care about you,” Matthew said intently. “Someone has to stand up and state that we don’t need it. We can have a better life, a normal life in the real world without that stuff. Let the bloody Gates of Elfland stay closed! It’s the best thing that could possibly happen!”

  Lucas had witnessed the meeting from outside, his face pressed to the corner of a misted pane. When it was over, someone went around the inside shutting the vents. He squeezed down into the shadows, waiting for them to finish. When he looked again, all the lights were out and the door through which he’d sneaked earlier was locked.

  Wonderful. He was trapped on the roof. Only now did he notice how very cold it was. On one side was a narrow terrace and parapet with the abyss of the night beyond; in front, a blank wall . . . behind, another strip of roof leading to a sort of storm porch.

  He went in and found a wooden door, unlocked; and behind it a staircase, leading up.

  Lucas was trying hard not to panic. If he could find his way up to the next floor, there must be a way back down into the main body of the house. Blind and clinging to a wobbly banister, he ascended.

  At the top, he could smell the thick dust and damp of a roof space. It was ink-black. There could be anything in here or he might stumble and put his foot through the ceiling . . . He froze. He had a vision of being found up here in fifty years’ time, a skeleton.

  His eyes adjusted, drawing dim shapes on the darkness with Aetheric sensitivity. Cautiously he began to edge through the space. There was an occasional floorboard but otherwise he was stepping on rafters. Trunks, boxes, hat stands and piles of musty curtains loomed nightmarishly around him.

  Away to his right, half-concealed by heaped material and old lampshades, he noticed something pale—luminous—actually glowing with its own light. He swallowed a yelp. Two more steps and he saw clearly the curve of a naked back.

  A body, human in shape. The thighs were folded underneath, the head bowed on the knees, arms lying loosely back along the floor, face hidden by a flow of hair. From the slumped shoulders a pair of wings curved into the air. All drawn in faded gold and bronze.

  The figure was breathing. It uttered the faintest groan.

  Lucas was transfixed. He said, “Hello?”

  No response. The glowing creature sobbed. Its voice roused such dread that he ran, stumbling and teetering, to the far side of the attic. There his hand found a doorframe, and the dome of an antiquated light switch. In a paroxysm of terror, he flicked it. A naked light bulb oozed a reluctant glow.

  A painting. He was looking at a life-sized framed oil painting of a disconsolate Eros, brown with layers of old varnish.

  Lucas fumbled at the door. It gave onto a small staircase down to a deserted landing—but he was inside the house again, and could hear the far-off murmur of the masquerade. He stood there gasping with fear, relief and laughter at his own idiocy.

  A painting. But he had seen it breathing. He had seen breathing, living flesh.

  3

  King of Elfland

  After the party, Lawrence sat in an armchair in the library, hands dangling over the sides and a cold breeze blowing over him through the open window. From here he could see the Great Gates. In the surface world, the sight was nothing remarkable; a rugged hill encircled by trees, crowned with folds of Precambrian rock, a characteristic feature of the Charnwood Forest.

  It was when he shifted his sight into the Dusklands that it became something else. A dolmen mound. A monumental structure, silvery and solid yet alive . . . set there by the Ancients, a crossing point between this world and the Underworld.

  His jaw taut, he looked away.

  It had been a wondrous labyrinth leading into the rich, layered realms of the Aelyr. Now it seemed a fortress, a series of gigantic doors, one inside the other, each locked, barred and impenetrable.

  He had barred those doors himself. Every time he closed his eyes he was there again; running, running as if against a flood; and the great unseen beast, the vaporous shadow giant Brawth was pursuing him. It filled the sky and it would be sated only by him. It had to punish him for some great transgression he could not even remember; had to destroy him, simply for existing. And worse; to flame everything in its path, to pierce the skull of every Aetherial with its burning sword of ice . . .

  His sons. It wanted his sons.

  The ice giant kept coming no matter how many gates he closed against it. Parts of it pushed through and were severed by the slamming gates, and came skittering after him in the wispy form of nightmares. Again and again in his memory, he crashed the last barrier shut and the tumblers of the combination span and everything went silent.

  Then Lawrence had fallen to his knees with exhaustion, and he had known.

  He would never dare to open the Gates again.

  Never.

  Fragments of the beast had leaked through and they hunted him still. Even as he sat here in the silent library he could feel them. They lived in dark corners of the house, mindless spies for their master. He could not tell them apart from the dysir, his own house guardians sent from the Spiral Court to protect him. He wasn’t safe.

  No one was safe, but however hard he tried to explain, he could not make them understand.

  He was walking with his grandmother in Ecuador, through the wilds of the Oriente rain forest. Lawrence was young, fifteen or so; his grandmother, Liliana, ageless. They’d discovered a narrow gully and were exploring along the bank of a creek that came clear and cold from the mountains. Liliana went ahead, rangy and athletic, her hair silver-white like the mist that rose around them. There were places on Vaeth that blended with the Dusklands, she was explaining, overlapping so strongly that even humans might stray there without realizing, and this was one such place. Too elusive to be mapped.

  She was showing him the world, teaching him how to sense such hidden places. This valley cast an immediate spell on him. Tree trunks coiled around each other, festooned with tumbling bromeliads and orchids. Lawrence smelled the rotting richness of the air, heard the echoing bell calls of birds and monkeys. A tiny purple hummingbird whirred past. Toucans watched from the branches. Everywhere he looked, he saw jewels; turquoise butterflies, bright green crickets, tiny poison-dart frogs.

  The pouch of stones he’d collected on their trip bumped against his thigh. Even as a boy he loved m
inerals, loved the solitude of cutting and polishing.

  The flash flood hit so fast that even Aetheric senses had little warning. Birdcall ceased. There was a terrible noise, a moment of confusion. Then the bank crumbled under Lawrence’s feet and he was being carried off in a deluge. Water the color of blood foamed and roared in his ears.

  Above the torrent, he heard his grandmother’s faint yell. “Lawrence! The Dusklands!”

  He panicked like a human for a few seconds. Then instinct kicked in. He held his breath and shifted himself fully into the first layer of the Aetheric realms.

  Around him, he felt the world change. The flow became smooth, enabling him to push his head clear. He grabbed onto a flat boulder midstream, hung there panting for a few moments, then hauled himself up.

  The stream had turned the color of midnight. The world was cooler, bluer. He could see the stars, lamp-bright. The bank looked too far away for him to jump, but Liliana was there, holding out a creeper-festooned branch to him. The branch shone silver like a fork of lightning. Lawrence seized it and leaped. On firm ground, he stood swaying and gasping.

  “Don’t forget,” Liliana said, “We always have this. We can skew reality, as surface dwellers cannot. It can save your life. Forget at your peril.”

  Then she called the names of the local elementals and said with good humor, “Desist! Let us pass in peace.”

  That remained Lawrence’s most vivid image of his grandmother; gaunt and silver-haired like some fairy-tale sorceress, calling the elements to heel; the forest steaming behind her. It happened with older Aetherials, that they began to seem stretched, translucent. Then they would turn away from the surface world and look ever deeper into the Spiral until their feet were bound to take them there.

  Liliana had been Gatekeeper for untold decades, and Lawrence was her heir. He carried what she called the lych-light within him. Lawrence grew afraid when he saw that translucency, knowing she would soon leave—might even abandon him here, if the call grew too strong. He was not ready to become Gatekeeper.

  As the solid world refocused around them, they saw that the bank had crumbled away all the length of the gully, revealing fresh red earth. The flood was slackening. Small rocks carried from the mountains tumbled in the flow. Lawrence saw a gleam of pure, clear glass. A nodule of quartz, he thought, torn from the mountain roots and washed here, to his feet. He leaned down and plucked it from the current.

  Not quartz. It turned pale violet at his touch and there were fragmented rainbows inside, like opal. The longer he looked, the more it revealed of its gorgeous, flashing fires. It felt, to his experienced fingers, as hard as diamond. A chill shivered through him; he’d seen such a stone before, but only in the Otherworld. Specifically, in Sibeyla, in his father’s hand, the day they’d parted.

  “What have you found?” asked Liliana.

  He’d never told her what his father, Albin, had done, what he’d said that day. But she would recognize the type of gem, of course. “It’s an Otherworld stone,” he said quietly. “Birthed in the Spiral. An Elfstone.”

  They climbed farther up the gully, balancing on the precarious bank. At the head, where the two valley walls converged and the water surged from underground, they found the place; a red cleft in the rock that lay within two realities, a thin place between the surface world and Naamon, realm of fire. A breach, a minor portal. He removed his boots and waded into the stream, feeling fragments of Elfstone beneath his feet, dislodged by the flood. The scarlet rock felt hot and burning cold to his touch, richly veined with minerals.

  “These stones have never been found on Earth, to my knowledge,” said Liliana, amazed. “The lych-light within you is for more than opening the Gates. It drew you here, called by the fire of Elfstones. You were meant to find them, Lawrence.”

  And she thought it a happy discovery, not knowing the torment the sight of the stones wrought in him. He wanted to destroy them. At the same time a compulsion surged through him, utterly irrational but irresistible, to dig out every last fragment in vain hope of finding the one Albin had stolen from him.

  Lawrence called the place Valle Rojo. And he named the mineral albinite, in tribute to his father—as if such a tribute could draw the approval he’d never yet won. The name was fitting. The gem, untouched, was cold white ice.

  Where was the lych-light now?

  There were no wages for being appointed Gatekeeper; it was a duty. The gemstone, however, brought him an earthly fortune. Years of experience made him a master jeweler, but it was albinite on which he built a small empire. Later, when he was able to return to Ecuador and claim Valle Rojo, he kept the operation closely guarded. He trained a tiny workforce of Vaethyr to pan and dig for raw mineral. He cut and set the stones himself, and displayed them in two exclusive stores, one in London, the other in New York. Externally, the stores were all black lacquer, with subdued interiors where jewelry sparkled in glass cases like rows of aquariums swimming with light.

  Albinite was unique, with a hardness of nine on the Mohs scale, and unparalleled luster and fire. Its brilliance was richer than that of diamonds, the rainbow lattice in its depths hypnotic. Now it graced some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of jewelry on the planet. He couldn’t stop humans from buying it, of course, but only his Aetherial customers truly appreciated its provenance. On their skin, its curious properties became apparent; it changed color, taking on a beautiful blue-violet gleam that would reflect flashes of red or green in response to an Otherworld portal. Elfstone wasn’t magic; it was simply reactive to different conditions, rather as the rare gem alexandrite showed green in daylight and crimson by candlelight.

  It had been a secret, sacred stone within the Spiral. Here on Earth, thanks to Lawrence, anyone who could afford it could wear it. Puritan Aelyr, like Albin, were bound to be outraged.

  The jewel had even brought Ginny to him. He was standing in the air-conditioned coolness of a trade show in Arizona when she had walked in from the burning heat, her black hair streaming against the sunlight, her skin sheened with sweat, masses of turquoise at her throat and wrists. The cosmic sparkle of albinite drew her. Then they laughed together, discovering they were both English and both Vaethyr. But Lawrence was from cold, mountainous Sibeyla, Ginny’s ancestry a mix of watery Melusiel and mysterious Asru; perhaps that made them incompatible from the start.

  So many years ago.

  He grew attached to Ecuador. He built a colonial-style ranch near the mine, his refuge from responsibility. A haven, until Ginny admitted she loathed it and could not stay. He had tried to blame her state of mind on illness, on Barada or Dumannios; but the truth was, it was Lawrence himself who drew the darkness down, and they both knew it.

  Albinite was not a magic amulet. It made him money but did not make him a better Gatekeeper. It could not protect them from the shadowy horrors of the Abyss.

  Years later, the gem also brought Sapphire to him. She worked in his New York and London stores before becoming his marketing manager. In the dark days after Ginny had fled, he had thought Sapphire could bring him back to life. Back to light. She soothed him, brought energy into the house, paid his sons the attention he’d never found it easy to give . . . but she could not defeat the demons. She was an innocent.

  Lawrence remembered lifting the river of her hair and sliding a necklace around her throat . . . her gasp of sensual delight. Gleaming ovals of albinite clasped in platinum—a fortune adorning her body, richer than diamond, rarer than tanzanite. Her delight had pleased him, but even then he should have known better than to drag her into his dark undeclared war.

  Now Lawrence stared at the derelict portal and felt nothing. The Vaethyr of Cloudcroft were out for his blood and he didn’t care. Auberon could not hold them back forever—and why should he try? So they would come for him at last, and perhaps then he would fling open the Great Gates, step aside and let the roaring beast devour them all. Let it be over, the Spiral laid waste, Aetherials destroyed, humans abandoned. Then would Albin b
e satisfied?

  Lawrence gripped the thick arms of his chair. No. He must go on protecting them, however much they hated him for it. For his sons’ sake, if not his own. He felt the darkness of the Abyss rising inside him. Leaning forward, he picked up his glass and felt whiskey running down his throat like hot tears to quench it.

  A silky movement behind him made him tense. Her reflection was a ghost on the dark window. “Darling?” said Sapphire. “Are you ever coming to bed?” She sat on the arm of his chair, her thigh warming his hand, her perfume sliding over him. “So, the party was a great success, despite your reservations.”

  It was hard to drag his mind back to the surface. He tried to sound gracious, not icily harsh. “Everything you did was magnificent.”

  “I told you it would be. Next year will be even better. Perhaps in the summer, a garden party . . .”

  “No,” he rasped. “No more parties.”

  He heard her indrawn gasp. She said reasonably, “I thought we agreed it was a success.”

  “I can’t fault the festive atmosphere. However, it was no pleasure to be listening all night for the first poisonous whisper about Sam.”

  “No one could fault you for trying to keep his difficulties secret,” she began, but he spoke across her.

  “Nor do I call it a success to be openly accosted by guests who used it as no more than an excuse to criticize the way I carry out my duties.”

  Again he heard her breathe carefully in and out. “I agree, it was unfair. But if you give them no other chance to speak to you . . .”

  “Well, I tell you, they won’t be given the chance again. That’s the first and last time I open my house, to humans or old blood alike.”

  “But I’ve told everyone—”

  “I don’t care what you’ve told them. No more parties.”

  She paused, said softly, “Is this about Sam?”

  “No. It isn’t.”