by Ross Lawhead
So that’s the trick, he thought as he flexed his aching hands. Meditate on the pain of existence and become more real. How miserable.
The enormous morning sun was just breaking from the horizon and throwing orange rays of light into his eyes, across his face.
“So what now?” he said out loud.
He thought of the only other people he had met in Elfland, of K?yle’s wood-burning hut in the forest, and felt himself moving. The plain flew beneath him, and then the trees, passing through him like he was nothing.
And then he was there. He focused on becoming “real” again, focused on pain, and felt his body solidify. He looked down at his clothes and noticed that he wore the blue outfit that he’d been given in Ni?ergeard, only scaled to his adult size.
“K?yle?” he called.
The clearing looked a little overgrown and disused. He moved over to one of the burning pits and saw weeds poking up through the thin layer of ash and burned earth that had been left behind when the last batch of charcoal had been made, which would have been. . weeks ago? Months?
“Daniel?”
He turned and saw Pettyl standing at the entrance to the hut. He smiled, happy to see a familiar and friendly face, but the face didn’t seem happy to see him. She wore a look of what may have been sorrow, or even despair. Her cheeks were sunken and eyes ringed with dark circles.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly sure about that, Pettyl,” he said, falling back into the Elfish he had learned. “I met up with three dead elves, and then there was Night. I was running, and then there was pain. .” Daniel trailed off. What had happened to him came in pictures that he didn’t think he could describe.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Do you. . do you think that I really am here? I’m not so sure if all of this is real, if I’m real. I mean, look-” Daniel allowed himself to discorporate. Pettyl seemed to experience no real surprise at this, merely staring at the place where he had been standing, in a mild stupor. Daniel thought of the space off to her side and appeared there.
“See?” he said, causing Pettyl to jump slightly. “It seems to me that I shouldn’t be able to do that.”
Pettyl reached out to him. Her hand rested on his chest and pushed slightly. He felt a rush of pleasure at a physical sensation that wasn’t cold or painful.
“It’s really you,” Pettyl said, pulling her hand away. Her face soured and she spat in his face. Daniel only barely recoiled and then felt Pettyl’s hands slapping at him. “How dare you? Are you here to torment me? To punish me some more? Is that why? Is it?”
Daniel dissolved and Pettyl’s hands passed through him and where he used to be. He hovered above the clearing.
“Why?” Pettyl called to the air. “We had so little! Why?” She fell to her knees and began weeping. Daniel just stayed where he was and watched. Emotions were softer and more distant in his cloud-like state. He watched Pettyl sob, finally still, and then pick herself up and move back into the hut.
Daniel concentrated on the clearing again and reappeared. He walked into the hut and saw Pettyl lying on one of the low wooden beds. There were bottles everywhere-elfish food.
“Pettyl?” he said. “I’m sorry, for. . whatever it is I’ve done.”
Pettyl did not move.
“What happened?”
She did not answer or move for a long time-it may have been hours. She may have been sleeping. Daniel just stood. He didn’t get tired or-after the horror of Night-grow bored. He was content just to wait.
Pettyl stirred and shifted off of the bed. She went to a box that stood by the entrance into the stable. She pulled out a tall, thin blue bottle, uncorked it, and took a long drink. She gave a cough, a sort of choking cough, and then laughed a lilting schoolgirl laugh.
“Pettyl? Where’s K?yle?”
She recorked the bottle and turned to look at him, smiling and swaying. “Ha ha. K?yle made a mistake and he paid for it.”
“What kind of mistake?”
Pettyl moved across the room with the long steps of a dancer. When she reached the centre of the room, she pirouetted and stood, her head tilted back. She swayed gently to a music that Daniel could not hear, a smile still on her face.
“He was working in the woods one day and a little bird fell down from the sky. It was lost and injured and weak.” She giggled. “K?yle picked it up and fed it, cared for it, and taught it to speak. And when it grew strong again, it took to the sky, and soaring among the treetops, the bird saw a bear and swooped down and pecked its eye out. The bear died, and that made the bear’s brothers very mad. Very mad, indeed. They talked to the wolves, and the wolves came and hounded K?yle away. That was the mistake that K?yle made-he was kind to a little bird. He was always so kind.”
“Who took him?” Daniel asked. “Pettyl, what really happened?”
“They did,” Pettyl said, giving a lurch and knocking over a few bottles with her feet. She spun around and around and then fell onto her bed. “The brothers. The ones you didn’t kill. They took him away-I don’t know where. They thought he had knowledge of the Elves in Exile.” She laughed awkwardly.
Daniel suddenly had an intuition. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
Pettyl guffawed.
“They took the wrong one, didn’t they?”
Pettyl became sombre suddenly.
“You know where they are-who they are. You were just coming back from them when I first arrived. You’re a resistance fighter.”
Pettyl frowned. “I was. I used to be. I still am, in a way. I’m a soldier, but I’m not allowed to fight. That was the plan. I joined in, K?yle didn’t, and so when they’d come, they’d take him and leave me. And now I can’t go back to them. I’m watched. So I stay here now. I drink.”
“Could you tell me where to find them?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know where they might be for certain. But they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Just follow the war.” This struck her as hilarious and she began laughing again.
“So they’re fighting openly now?”
“Yes,” said Pettyl, getting herself under control. “They have been for the last eight months. Perhaps they’re all dead. All of them dead.”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel said. “I think that they’re still alive, and that I’ve been sent here for a reason. I’m certain of it. First I’m going to find them. Then I’m going to rescue K?yle. Then I’m going to help them win this war. The Elves in Exile will return, and I will stand by the true prince as he takes his place on the throne.”
Pettyl giggled.
At length, Daniel managed to get some information from Pettyl that he thought would be useful-a direction and a few landmarks. Then he set about looking for the Elves in Exile. It had been a trick to actually move around, at first. He had previously only been able to transport himself to places he’d been before simply by picturing them. How could he picture a place he’d never been?
The answer came to him when he realised that he could, naturally, picture a place that he could see, and so move that way, hopping from place to place either in his cloud form or his bodied form. It was a rather arduous and disorienting way to travel, but then he found he could fly. Fly, in a certain fashion. All he had to do was to picture himself in the sky instead of on the ground, and there he would be. In his cloud-state he could travel very swiftly across the landscape.
It was beautiful, the landscape, even from a distance. A seemingly endless tableau of hills, forests, lakes, streams, rivers, plains, mountains, and valleys. Occasionally there would be a puckered scar of a dirt road or an unsightly growth of a town. When he saw these, he would move downward to investigate-see if there was anything that would let him know that he was on the right track. Pettyl’s descriptions had been vague-sometimes to the point of contradiction-but he had memorised them anyway and began his search eastward.
He didn’t know how much ground he had travelled. He didn’t know how fast he
was going, the scale of the distances he was seeing, or even the size of the planet he was on.
At last he found the landmark he’d been looking for-a distant, pale spike on the horizon. He pictured it larger and larger and arrived at what Pettyl had called Ashkh’s Spindle.
It was a tower of rock that rose almost a mile into the air. From his approach, it seemed to jut perpendicularly from the horizon, but as he came nearer, he saw that it protruded at an angle away from him, only a couple degrees, but enough to make it look horribly unstable.
Around this landmark was devastation. What had once been a lightly wooded plain-based on Pettyl’s description-was now a smouldering field of cinders. Everything that could burn had been incinerated. Tree trunks still smouldered, houses lay in ruins. For perhaps a mile all around the tower the landscape was an enormous scorch mark, and at its centre the Spindle rose up and above.
With a feeling of dread, Daniel descended, wanting to take a closer look at the destruction, praying that he wasn’t too late but fearing that he already was.
As he neared, he realised that his depth perception was off-here, everything seemed compacted and yet expanded at the same time. What had seemed from the sky to be nearly a mile, was mile upon mile. Perhaps as much as twenty or thirty. He finally reached ground and materialised in the centre, surrounded by sooty blackness. He could walk for a day on ash and charred wood.
It must have been a siege, he thought. The Elves in Exile, some of them at least, had been tracked here and trapped. The enemy had then razed the ground around them to prevent their escape under cover.
Daniel looked up at the finger of rock, larger than a skyscraper, and only bearing the black patina of soot on the lower quarter of its length. The flames had not even reached halfway. Had they survived?
Was the siege still in progress?
An odd sort of pattern caught his eye. Midway between him and the start of the rock spire was a sort of cobweb construction. It took him a little while to focus, since at first he thought it was a spider’s web, but it was far away, not small. He neared it.
Two large posts, several storeys in height, had been inserted, somehow, into the ground, and strung between them, in a concentric pattern, was a gruesome lattice work of elfin bodies. They were splayed, spread-eagled and tied hand to foot, where their arms and legs were still attached. Some of them were warriors, but not all of them-not most of them. There were women in hard-wearing elfin gowns and farmwives, as well as labourers, dressed much like K?yle. With a start, he thought that one of them might be his friend, but none of the twisted faces, already starting to blacken from decay, seemed to be his. Looking across, he could see that other webs had been erected as well and looked to encircle the whole of the spire.
Looking up at the stark, grey rock form, he resolved that it was time to investigate properly now. He dissipated and started gliding upward. His mind was adjusting to the new way of travel, and he was now able to move more smoothly and not simply leap from place to place. He was glad of this on one hand, but also terrified of having this strange state seem anything like natural to him.
It was only as he neared the top that he saw how exactly anyone could stay on the rock for any amount of time. The entire top fifth was honeycombed with holes, some of which were open, some covered by glass windows or wooden shutters. The holes gave the appearance of being natural, but they seemed orderly, evenly spaced and of the same size. He circled slowly and saw movement in one of the windows. Instantly he was drawn into it.
The room was oblong, hewn from the stone but nonetheless furnished comfortably with carpeting and tapestries that blended one into the other, hung or nailed somehow against the curved walls, making it cocoon-like in its cosiness. There was a wooden table that was polished so well it reflected like a mirror. Three elves were sitting around this table, sitting upright in stone chairs, their hands resting on the table in front of them. They were pale and wasted to such an extent that Daniel could almost believe that they were shadows, apparitions. Two of them, bearded and coarse, looked despondently over the table and its many papers and maps as well as a good number of empty bottles and jars. One had hair as black as raven’s feathers, and the other’s was red.
The third, who seemed younger, but Daniel had found you never could tell with them, was clean shaven, or naturally hairless, and hunched forward, hands clenched together and held beneath his nose, his eyes dull in their sunken sockets.
Daniel thought they were all in a trance, hypnotised perhaps, until one of the bearded elves stood up and declared, “There’s someone else here.”
The other two looked up at him.
“Can’t you feel it? It’s in the air. Floating around us.” He waved a hand vaguely, heavily.
“Your mind is fevered,” the man opposite him said. “Sit back down.”
“No, I. . I could swear. .” He lowered himself back into his chair with shaking legs. “If there be any spirit, sprite, fetch, or sending here, I demand and invoke it to show itself!” he cried, listing from side to side. “Out of common decency, if by no other power.”
Daniel considered and then, holding a sort of breath that he wasn’t breathing, reincorporated himself at the end of the table opposite the younger elf.
All of them sprang back in shock, even the raven-haired elf who had demanded he show himself.
“Who or what are you?” the red-haired elf gasped.
“My name is Daniel Tully. You helped me out once by sending Kay Marrey to meet me. He saved my life. I’ve come to return the favour.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Daniel’s Torment
I
Daniel walked around the interior of the deserted mountain outpost.
It had been an incredibly eventful and extremely long day-even by Elfland standards. Luckily, he didn’t seem to get tired in this new form. He had found that the younger looking elf of the three in the Spindle had been Prince Filliu, the leader of the Elves in Exile. After proper introductions had been made between him and the two generals he was with, they showed Daniel the rest of their trapped war band, which was in as poor and anaemic state as they were, lying listlessly in side rooms and storerooms that had been converted into barracks. They were in a bad way. They had had no form of sustenance-their odd liquids they lived on in this land-for a very long time, and they were, literally, he found, fading. They didn’t starve to death, it turned out, but just became thin, in an existential sense. They stopped moving, lying as still as statues until revived.
Daniel was then introduced to a group of warrior wizards, who toiled over dispelling the enchantments that the enemy had cast around them. The grotesque web of elves was one of the enemy’s many sieging enchantments; if removed, it would potentially allow the war wizards opportunity to unravel the rest of the oppressive charms.
So Daniel studied magical charts and maps of the area and then did some reconnaissance. He floated down into the forests and hills that surrounded the burned-out crater that ringed the Spindle. There he spied on enemy soldiers-snipers, warlocks, and warliches-and reported back to the prince and his wizards on their positions. They then decided which webs were tactfully best to dismantle. After that, Daniel descended again and started taking one of them apart.
His actions were not unnoticed, he realised, when elfish arrows started raining down on him. His invulnerability proved itself again when he found the arrows-which were shot with stunning accuracy at the distance of over a mile-simply glancing off of him. He used their heads, which were long, thin, and made of bronze, to cut through the ropes that tied the dead elves together. Then he moved on to the other sections. As soon as he started working on the fourth-a deliberate tactical feint-the Elves in Exile made their escape.
Daniel watched them from the sky as they flooded out of the base of the tower under heavy fire. Even weak and wasted, they rallied in an impressive, united effort. The wizards created reflective planes around the tower that masked the true path of the elves’ egress, so it look
ed like five times more than their actual number were escaping. Some were lost in the dash from the tower to the start of the forest. There was an enemy outpost there that the escaping elves quickly overran, being caught ill-prepared. Taking only a short moment to plunder the storehouse of its provisions, the elves retreated back into the forest.
They went for miles, pausing just once, in order to divide and consume the plundered drink stores and give themselves the energy they so desperately needed to continue their flight. Daniel reappeared to Filliu and the generals again at that point, and they thanked him for his help. They agreed to meet again when they were free from the wrongful princes’ forces, at one of the places that they had agreed upon.
And so Daniel came here, to the complex of caves, many miles ahead of the elves and their pursuers. So far he was alone, and he had been for hours. He went to the entrance of the cave where pillars of stone created a forest-like cover. Looking out, he wondered when he would catch sight of his latest companions, and whether he could do anything to help. The dimming sky unnerved him. What would happen in the next hours? Would Night take him again? Or was that behind him?
“So, how was your day?” came a voice from behind him.
Turning, he saw the three murdered elves standing in the corridor behind him. It was Stowe who had spoken.
“Oh, you guys again,” he said with dread.
“More than that, how was last night?” Fiall said with a vicious grin.
“It was fine. I survived, obviously, and now I’m helping to restore the true king of these lands to his throne.” He looked at the dead prince, Lhiam-Lhiat, for a reaction, but his face showed nothing but pity. “So it hasn’t slowed me down any.”
“Admirable,” said Stowe.
“I haven’t learned anything either,” Daniel said, the heat rising within him. “Whatever you were trying to teach me, it’s not getting through. I still don’t regret what I’ve done, and I still say I’d do it again.”
