by Anders, Lou
“Poisoned,” answered the elf. “A scratch will do it. One’s diluted hemlock.”
“And the other?”
“Something really nasty.”
Thianna lunged, but the elf danced away, somehow managing to strike out at the giantess’s forearm as she did so. Thianna shoved with her free hand, knocking the elf away. What would have been a cut only tore her sleeve.
They feinted back and forth at each other, but neither could land any real blows. They were both too quick, too sure on their feet. Despite her size advantage, Thianna realized she was facing one of the fastest and most coordinated opponents she’d ever met. She had nearly two feet of height on the girl, but they were evenly matched. Having grown up around frost giants who made fun of her for her own size, she could almost admire the elf for giving such a good show of it. Almost.
A dart cut another gash in her sleeve. Thianna punched with her free hand again and clipped a shoulder. The elf staggered.
“Got you!”
“Sure you do,” the elf said. “You know what they say about big trees?”
“What’s that?” said Thianna, dodging out of the way of the dart the elf had just thrown.
Something else flew at Thianna’s head. She struck it with her sword without thinking. But it wasn’t a dart. It was small, round, vaguely egg-shaped. Her sword connected like she was batting a Knattleikr ball. But it didn’t fly away.
The egg-thing stuck fast to her blade. A noxious purple gas billowed from it. Thianna’s eyes instantly stung, and her throat started to seize up. Thianna hadn’t been outfought; she’d been outwitted! Tricked! All the thrown darts had lulled her into a pattern. She hadn’t thought when she struck the last projectile from the air in the same way as the first. The elf had wanted her sword to connect. Thianna’s vision was dimming. She dropped to her knees, choking and gasping for breath.
The elf crept close to her, but now all Thianna could do was cough. She felt her consciousness receding. The elf put a hand on her chest and firmly shoved her over.
“Big trees? They hit the ground the hardest when they fall.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Karn stood in the doorway to his room at Fosco’s Folly. The table, chair, and nightstand were overturned. The sheets had been ripped off the tiny bed. The mattress was dumped on the floor, its canvas slashed open, and all the straw pulled out. The golden statue of Cybelle lay on the ground, slightly dented as though someone had struck it to see if it was hollow. It wasn’t. Thianna’s backpack had been opened and its contents emptied and rifled through.
His room had been thoroughly ransacked. Or at least as ransacked as a room this barren could be. But it was clear that while he was meeting with Leflin Greenroot, someone had snuck in and searched through his things. Nothing seemed missing, though, not even Thianna’s cooking gear, which was about the only thing of any value.
Behind him, Fosco whistled.
“Someone had a time in here tonight,” he said.
“I’ll pay for the damages,” Karn replied.
“What’s to pay for? Stuff the straw back into the tick and stitch it up. I suppose you could pay for the thread, if you like.”
Karn nodded. Mechanically he began picking up the items in the room. Despite his bluster in front of Leflin, he feared for Thianna. He wanted to go home and forget all about magic horns and dark elves.
Fosco saw his face. He touched Karn on the arm in sympathy.
“All comes of letting the big folk stay here, I suppose,” he heard the innkeeper grumble as he left.
Karn stuffed the straw back into the torn mattress, then sat in the doorway with his back to the frame and restowed Thianna’s possessions in her backpack. Whoever did this hadn’t known Thianna had lodged here previously, or the room would have been ransacked sooner. They’d followed Karn here. Doubtless after he announced himself at the gate. He was a terrible sneak.
Karn was so lost in dejection that he banged his head on the door frame as he stood. “Oh for Neth’s sake!” he swore. “You’d think someone reared in a longhouse should know better.” Not for the first time, he tried to picture Thianna amid the tiny inn. Then a notion came to him.
Both Greenroot and whoever did this—dark elves, he was sure—were convinced that Thianna had given him something. Which meant that they didn’t have it. And that meant she really might still be alive. She wasn’t carrying whatever it was on her person or they’d have found it. She must have hidden it somewhere. But the elves, or whoever, wouldn’t have supposed that Thianna would stay at an inn for wee folk. Only Karn knew her well enough for that. He looked at the ripped-up mattress. His opponents were trying to think like he thought, looking for hiding places that Karn would have selected. Not hiding places that Thianna might have chosen. Dark elves weren’t necessarily short, but they weren’t particularly tall either. And no one was as tall as Thianna.
Karn grabbed the chair and dragged it to the middle of the floor. He stepped up onto it and stood slowly, bending at the knees and being careful not to bang his head again on the ceiling. Then he turned a slow circle.
He needed to look at the room from Thianna’s vantage point. There. One of the ceiling beams had a crack running for most of its length. The gap, only visible when standing on the chair, or standing in a frost giant’s daughter’s shoes, was easy to spot.
Karn poked a finger in and felt something. He couldn’t get a grip, though, so he took out his knife and carefully slid the blade into the gap. He pressed down and scraped an object out of the small aperture. It fell, and he caught it in his hand. It was small and made of iron.
“A key,” said Karn, so thrilled that he spoke out loud. There weren’t any markings on the metal. Nothing to indicate where he was supposed to take it. “ ‘First to a Castle in the Briars, where ends all of life’s desires…’ ”
“What’s that?” said Fosco. The innkeeper had returned bearing needle and thread.
Karn instinctively closed his fist around the key, hiding it.
Fosco indicated the chair.
“Not tall enough already, kid?”
“Oh, no,” said Karn. “I, ah, just missed my friend.”
Fosco eyed him strangely, then he went over to the mattress and began to sew it up.
“Life’s a struggle, kid. Ups and downs. Nobody’s free of problems. Rich, poor, wee folk, big folk. We all get our share of troubles. There. There’s your mattress stitched up good as new.” Fosco dusted off his hands and stood. He paused in the doorway and turned around. “Still, it’s like my mother used to say, ‘Better to be alive with worries than dead with no complaints.’ ”
Karn grunted agreement. His mind was still racing with excitement at his discovery of the key. Where was the lock that it fit? How did it work with the end of all of life’s desires?
Then Fosco’s parting words slowly penetrated his mind.
Better to be alive with worries than dead with no complaints.
“I know,” whispered Karn. “I know where ends all of life’s desires!”
—
Grave Hill was a knoll to the west of the city. Karn studied the rows upon rows of tombstones. It wasn’t how his own people marked the resting places of their dead. But it was easy to see what it was for.
“It’s like a stone forest,” said Nesstra.
“What are you doing here?” said Karn, startled by the sudden appearance of the wood elf. He has spent an uneasy night with the bathtub shoved up against his door, waiting for intruders to return. In the morning, he had slipped out of Fosco’s before the sun came up, leaving from a back exit. He’d walked a zigzag path around the city, slipping in and out of various shops and doubling back several times, trying to throw off any unseen pursuers.
He’d even left by the east gate and then walked all the way around to the western side of Castlebriar. Only when he was sure no one was tailing him had he finally come to the graveyard.
“Followed you,” said Nesstra. “We’v
e gotten quite a bit of exercise, don’t you think?”
“I wanted to come alone.” Karn scowled.
“I told you I’d help.”
“Why would you do that?”
“You helped me.”
Karn considered that. “I didn’t really.”
“You tried to help me then,” Nesstra said. “A stranger. You were being brave even if you weren’t effective.”
“It was two against one,” Karn said, defending himself. “I did hold them off until you freed your darts.”
“Exactly,” replied the elf. “We made a…a good team.”
There it was again, that hesitation. Maybe this wood elf really needed a friend, so much so that she’d attach herself to a stranger’s mad quest. He did understand that. Karn missed having Thianna at his side. It would be nice to have someone he could rely on. And Nesstra was certainly a good fighter. And a fellow gamer too. Maybe they could get in a few more sessions of Charioteers when this was over.
“I met with Greenroot last night,” he confessed. “I’ve already got dark elves to watch out for. He thinks there are others who want hidden things to stay hidden.”
Nesstra was silent for a moment as Karn’s information sank in, then her words came out in an explosion.
“I can’t believe you went to Greenroot without me!” she yelled, her gold skin reddening in anger. “Why are you cutting me out?”
“I don’t—uh…”
“Don’t want help? Don’t think I’m capable?”
“It isn’t that.”
“Don’t want to share your treasure?” she demanded, poking him hard in the sternum.
“Don’t want you getting hurt!”
Nesstra blinked. “What?”
“I don’t want you getting hurt, all right?” Karn said. “I think things are about to get dangerous.”
Nesstra was quiet for a moment. Karn wondered what she could be thinking. Then she tapped the slender darts strapped to her thigh.
“Let me worry about who gets hurt.” She walked to a tombstone and rested a hand on it. “Tell me why we’re here.”
“Because this is the end of life’s desires,” Karn explained, resigning himself to her company but also glad of it. “Once you’re dead, you don’t want anything anymore. I didn’t see it at first, because Norrønir bury our own dead in mounds, and, well, some of the dead in them are still pretty greedy.”
“The dead are greedy?”
“Long story. Tell you another time. But I wonder why the dark elves haven’t figured this out yet.”
“They live underground. They don’t bury their dead in the earth like humans do. The Svartálfar float the deceased out on boats on a big subterranean river and then set the boats on fire.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“They’re still elves, right? Even if they don’t like the sun.” She turned around and leaned on the tombstone. “So what’s our next move?”
“We’re looking for something that is ‘over Oak and under Corn.’ ”
“ ‘There to seek the soundless Horn,’ ” Nesstra finished. “Let’s get started. After your morning stroll, we don’t have that much daylight left.”
There were a couple of tall oak trees scattered about Grave Hill, though nothing that resembled corn. Nesstra scrambled up both of them, all the way to the top—she was so nimble!—but she reported finding no clues among their branches.
“The riddle didn’t make sense,” the elf complained. “Oak trees are taller than cornstalks, aren’t they? How can something be over an oak but under corn? Shouldn’t it be ‘under oak and over corn’? Maybe we have it wrong.”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, it’s all we’ve got to go on.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense.”
“If it were easy, everybody would be doing it! The horn would have been found years ago.”
Karn studied the tombstones. They ranged from simple slabs with a name and date carved into their surface to elaborately wrought headstones with statues and ornamentation. Not surprisingly, the higher on the hill they climbed, the fancier the grave sites became. But the tombs also got older as they climbed higher. Nothing seemed to fit the riddle, however.
“We’re going about this wrong,” said Karn. “We’d spend a month combing over every single tomb.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Greenroot said the horn came to Castlebriar when it was still a Gordion outpost called Castrusentis. That means we can eliminate any tomb with a date after Three AG, when the Gordion Empire fell. We only search the oldest, and the oldest are the highest.”
“To the top of the hill.”
“To the top of the hill.”
The oldest grave markers at the crest of the knoll were extremely weathered. After all, they were nearly a thousand years old and older. Their designs also made the most use of ancient Gordion deities. Karn saw several likenesses of the horn-shouldered figure and the god on horseback that he’d first glimpsed on public buildings in the ruined city of Sardeth. He also saw quite a few images of Cybelle, the mountain mother, goddess of town and city walls, fertility, and…
“Corn.”
“What?”
“Look for images of the mountain mother. Cybelle. She’s the goddess of corn. Thianna had her statue in her room. Look for her on tombs that also have images of oak trees.”
Nesstra and Karn ran among the tombstones. They were both buzzing with excitement. It didn’t take long.
“Found it,” the wood elf said.
Karn came to where she stood, looking where she pointed.
A simple slab, though a large one. It had a carving of an oak leaf in a circle. Under this was a carving of the goddess Cybelle. And between them, a keyhole.
“ ‘Under oak and over corn,’ ” observed Karn.
“I don’t know what we do next, though,” said Nesstra. “Maybe I can try picking that lock.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Then what do we do?”
“We use this,” Karn said.
Nesstra gaped at the key in Karn’s palm.
“What else are you holding out on me?”
“What? Don’t you have any secrets?” said Karn.
Nesstra didn’t answer.
—
The key slid easily into the keyhole. Karn twisted it in the lock. There was a soft click, followed by a louder one, and then the slab sank slowly into the ground with a grinding noise. In the hole now revealed, they saw a staircase leading down into the earth.
They started down the stairs, Nesstra leading the way. The sunlight only penetrated a few feet into the passage, but she didn’t seem bothered by the dark.
“Wait up,” Karn said. He slipped Thianna’s phosphorescent stone out of his shirt, where it hung on the cord about his neck. Giving it a shake, he activated its wan light.
“Oh, right,” said Nesstra. “Thanks.”
The steps ended at the start of a narrow corridor. The walls on either side were decorated with patterns that looked like the rings of tree stumps. At the end of the passage, a great slab of stone was held up by a large shield propped under it. The shield was rectangular, around three feet in height and two feet wide, and slightly curved, and had an elaborate design painted on its face. It had obviously been placed deliberately to prevent the slab from sealing off whatever lay beyond.
“That’s a scutum,” said Karn. “The troops of the Gordion Empire carried them a thousand years ago.”
Nesstra didn’t pause for the history lesson. She ducked under the slab. Not wanting to be left behind, Karn dropped to the ground and crawled under as well. But he eyed the ancient shield warily as he scooted through, taking care not to bump it. If it were to give out, they’d be trapped when the heavy stone slid down.
He found himself in a much larger space, circular with a domed ceiling. The floor had the same tree stump pattern as the walls outside. The center of the chamber was dominated by a huge stone sarcophagus
, the lid of which was carved to look like a body, lying horizontal across the top.
“Obviously, this is meant to represent whoever is inside,” said Karn. He brought the light close. The figure was robed and bearded.
“He looks like a scholar,” Nesstra said.
Karn nodded, but he was concerned. The figure held two hands up in front of his face, as though he had been clasping something, and his lips were puckered.
“It’s not here,” said Karn.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the carving’s hands. He was holding a horn. It’s made to look like he was blowing it. They buried his body and put the horn in the hands of his statue. Then sealed this whole place up. Someone’s been here since and taken it out.”
“Maybe it was just a carved horn—part of this statue.”
“They didn’t break it off. They slid it out.”
“Maybe it’s in the sarcophagus. With the body.”
Karn studied the slab. It looked as if it weighed a ton. It also looked undisturbed, mold and the dirt of ages smeared evenly across its seal.
“I don’t think anybody’s opened this in a millennium.”
“It has to be here!” said Nesstra. “It has to be.”
“Well, it isn’t,” he said, feeling defeated.
“Who could have taken it?” She looked around the room frantically, as if searching for a thief.
“I’m guessing whoever left that scutum shield.”
“No, that would mean—”
“That the horn was taken over a thousand years ago,” Karn finished, “by a soldier in an army that doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“I can’t believe this. I can’t.”
“I don’t know why you are so upset,” said Karn. “After all, I’m the one searching for Thianna. It’s not like—”
He stopped speaking. Something peculiar had caught his attention.
“What’s with your ears?” he asked.
“They’re long,” replied Nesstra irritatedly. “Don’t tell me you’re just noticing.”
“No. I mean, why are they twitching?”
“What?” asked the elf.
“Your ears; they’re twitching.”
Nesstra stilled, her ears lifting as she listened intently. Then her expression turned to alarm.
