The Elven

by Bernhard Hennen

  “You have to hurry,” Mandred shouted in a resounding voice. “Do you hear? You have to hurry, or all is lost!”

  He almost broke off the magic to see what the jarl was talking about, but he stopped himself in time and clenched his teeth.

  His hands were caught between hot coals and frost. He could not stop, not then, and he moved the Albenstone closer to the star.

  “Good!” Mandred called. “It’s slowing! That’s good!”

  When Nuramon heard his words, he knew he was fighting not only against a barrier, but also against the magic that had created the image of Firnstayn. The flames surrounding the path to the silver plate burned brighter than those of the other paths.

  Nuramon began to tremble when he held the Albenstone directly over the flames. He lost control over the magic.

  “By the Alben!” he heard Farodin shout. “Quickly! Nuramon, quickly!”

  Nuramon felt himself getting colder and colder. His hands seemed to freeze solid. The cold was like hoarfrost creeping through his veins. The stone was no longer a spring of cold; it was a frigid ocean, and Nuramon was close to drowning in it. The power of the stone was threatening to overwhelm him completely.

  “You have to do it, Nuramon!” Farodin cried. “Do it now, or never!”

  The pain of a thousand needles drove into him. He heard himself scream. Then he lost his balance, and something hot took hold of him and swept him away.

  Ruins

  Cold drizzle stroked Mandred’s face. He felt giddy and braced himself against the weathered wall. Where an elegant vaulted ceiling should have been, there was now no more than gray sky. The monastery through which they had found their way into the Shattered World lay in ruins. Mandred’s fingers dug into a joint between the stones of the wall. The pale-brown mortar crumbled at the slightest touch. This place had been abandoned long ago . . . whatever Farodin might say.

  The jarl looked over at Nuramon. His comrade was crouched in front of the recess in the wall where Liodred’s body was laid out. Nuramon had changed. From one moment to the next, a streak of white had appeared in his hair. The elf seemed years older. The lines of his face were not as soft as they had been, but this was not the worst change in him. Nuramon rocked on the balls of his feet and hummed softly to himself. He was staring emptily at a pile of ashes against the opposite wall. His hands were still wrapped tightly around the golden Albenstone. Twice, at Farodin’s request, Mandred had tried to get him to give up the stone, but Nuramon held on to it so tightly that Mandred would have had to break his fingers to get it. Ever since Nuramon had worked his magic, he had not been his old self. Sometimes he seemed not to recognize them at all. Mandred wondered whether the elf might be possessed.

  A golden arc of light sprang up among the ruins. Farodin, exhausted, smiled. “They haven’t destroyed the gate here. It is not like it was in the temple tower.”

  Mandred fought down a fresh wave of nausea. A vague pain throbbed in his forehead. He recalled the images he had seen in the silver mirror. “Is it safe?” he asked. His voice was full of distrust. “We can’t afford to jump through time. You know—”

  Farodin cut him off with a harsh gesture. “No one can ever be safe. Forget what you saw in the mirror. That was the deceiver. He wanted to sow doubt in your heart, and it seems like he succeeded.”

  “It looked very real,” Mandred objected.

  Farodin said nothing. He went to Nuramon, talking to him gently, then he helped him to his feet. “We’re going home?” Mandred heard Nuramon ask, and his voice was thin and shaky.

  The rain made Farodin’s long hair hang in wet strands. He swept it out of his face and propped Nuramon under one arm. “Yes. We’re going back. It’s only a little way. Emerelle is waiting for us.”

  Mandred felt like howling in rage. What had happened to his friend? What had the spell done to him? Again, he thought of the images in the mirror, and he hoped that Farodin was right, that it had all been an illusion.

  “Quickly!” shouted the elf.

  Mandred picked up the corpse of Liodred and laid the dead king’s head on his shoulder as if he were carrying a sleeping child. The king’s weight nearly brought him to his knees. Just a few steps, Mandred reproached himself. He staggered toward the gate. One last, despairing time, he looked around. What had happened here? Why had the monastery been destroyed? It had to be the most important of all of the Tjured monasteries, didn’t it?

  Farodin and Nuramon disappeared into the golden light, and Mandred hurried after them. The path through the emptiness had not changed. They followed a golden path through absolute silence. The only sound was the whistling of his own breath.

  One edge of the breastplate of Liodred’s armor cut painfully into Mandred’s shoulder. He nearly stumbled and fell. The jarl kept his eyes on the glowing path. Do not stray.

  The crossing came suddenly. Icy wind tore at Mandred’s thin braids. What he saw left him dumbstruck. The image in the silver mirror had not lied.

  “Down,” hissed Farodin, tugging at Mandred’s cloak. Exhausted, Mandred’s knees gave way, and he dropped to the ground.

  By the gods. What had happened here? Where was his homeland? Deepest winter was upon the land. He and his companions were crouching in a snowdrift by the shore of the fjord. A thick sheet of ice lay over the water.

  In front of them stretched Firnstayn. The city had grown to many times the size that Mandred remembered, just as they had seen it in the Devanthar’s lair. Fortified walls of dark stone had been built out as far as the Albenstar that Emerelle had once created, a mile from the town. Wide gaps had been smashed through the ramparts.

  But most monstrous of all was the change directly in front of them. Something was growing from the Albenstar they had just stepped through. Mandred could not find words for it. It was something that should not exist. Straight across the fjord and up as far as the stone circle on the cliff top stretched . . . an alteration. The sight reminded him of something he had seen in the library in Iskendria. He had once found himself in a room, the walls of which were decorated with beautiful murals, but one of the walls was damaged. The plaster was cracked and torn, and in several places, it had broken away from the masonry beneath. And because of that, he could see a second picture, lying beneath the first, painted in brilliant colors and no less beautiful than the new mural. Mandred could not understand why anyone would have hidden it beneath a layer of plaster.

  It was like that here, too. Something had been ruptured or torn open. And beyond the fjord that Mandred had known ever since childhood, something else had now appeared. The air between the two overlaying images shimmered and seemed to be melting, as it sometimes did on very hot days in summer. The picture that presented itself on the far side of the rupture was blurred, but Mandred still recognized it instantly. It was the landscape in which he had awoken after he had fled from the manboar. He saw the blooming springtime fields of Albenmark. The derelict watchtower seemed to be just over there, on the other shore of the fjord. And not far from it, the mighty branches of Atta Aikhjarto stretched skyward, but something about the old oak looked amiss. In contrast to the trees farther away, Atta Aikhjarto’s branches were leafless. Mandred squinted his eyes to be better able to see. The massive oak stood out darkly against the sky. There was something small and white beside it, but Mandred could not make it out. The molten air blurred everything. Finally, he turned to Farodin, who seemed no less disconcerted, while Nuramon simply sat in the snow and stared ahead.

  “What’s the matter with Atta Aikhjarto?” the jarl asked. “Why isn’t he green?”

  “Dead trees have no leaves,” Farodin replied.

  The answer hit Mandred like a fist in his gut. Impossible. What could kill a souled tree? Aikhjarto possessed magic and was unimaginably old. “You’re wrong.”

  “I wish I were,” Farodin replied in a dejected voice. “They must have set fires around him. May
be they even used Balbar’s fire from Iskendria. Aikhjarto’s trunk is blackened. All the smaller branches are burned completely away. It looks like they used him as a symbol in the war against Albenmark. They’ve planted one of their banners beside him. You know it. It shows the burned oak.”

  “But how could he—”

  “How is a tree supposed to run away?” Farodin cut him off in irritation. Then, in a more conciliatory tone, he added, “And even if Atta Aikhjarto had had legs, that old oak heart of his would never have fled from an enemy.”

  Mandred said nothing more. He thought of the oath he had sworn to Aikhjarto on the day he had awoken in Albenmark. He had promised that his axe would stand between the oak and his enemies. That he had been unable to help his friend made Mandred all the more miserable.

  He looked away from the old tree and turned his attention to Firnstayn. From some of the towers fluttered the banners of the Tjured sect. Entire sections of the city had been razed. Ships lay half sunk in the ice at their moorings. Even out in the fjord itself, in several places, masts rose through the thick ice sheet. How many people had lived in the city? And where were they now? Had the knights of Tjured killed them all? Mandred thought of the night they had visited besieged Iskendria. Had the same vicious battles been fought here?

  “Lower,” Farodin warned. From the south, a troop of three riders was moving across the ice. They were the advance guard of a long column of horse-drawn sleds. The riders were heading toward the city. From one of the towers came the sound of a signal horn.

  The three men on horseback rode past not twenty paces from the shore. Their armor looked strange to Mandred. It was blackened and fashioned from interlocking metal plates, like Liodred’s armor. Heavy gauntlets protected their hands from the cold, and they wore knee-high boots and long white cloaks with the emblem of the blackened tree. On their heads they wore helmets with a metal crest running from the front to the back, and cheek plates that came very low. A broad weapon belt ran straight across the breastplate of each man’s armor, and from it hung an unusually slim-bladed sword. Two strange leather pouches were attached to the front of their saddles and appeared to contain short clubs.

  The horses’ breath hung in white clouds around their nostrils. The animals seemed exhausted, and the knights’ faces were red with cold. Mandred wondered how long he and his companions had spent in the Devanthar’s treasure rooms. These knights . . . they seemed different from the Tjured knights they had faced in the sea battle. And they carried no shields.

  He turned his gaze back to the ruins of Firnstayn. How many centuries had it taken to grow so much? He could not find an answer.

  One of the three riders cut away from the other two and steered a straight course for the rupture. Mandred, tense, held his breath, but horse and rider simply passed through to the other side. For two or three heartbeats, they vanished. Then the soldier reappeared on the broad green meadow, passed by the ruined watchtower, and set a course for the path through the forest.

  The other two riders, a moment later, turned their horses up a ramp that led onto a pier, and from there, they vanished into the laneways of the city.

  Mandred turned and looked back. The sleds were now much closer. Riders equipped like the three men in their advance guard protected the flanks of the column. The sleds were large and piled high with supplies. From where Mandred and his companions were watching behind the beach, they were too low to get a good overview, and Mandred could not tell how many of the sleds were still coming. It was certainly no less than a hundred. He turned to the city again. Despite the darkness of the winter afternoon, lights only shone from scattered windows. People who built houses of stone like those did not suffer from hardship. There should have been far more lamps burning than what he could see. Were the lamps only lit in the houses that the priests, officers, and soldiers had taken possession of, the houses that had not burned?

  “We have to get away from here,” Farodin whispered. He pointed to the smashed trunk of a pine tree protruding from the snow a short way up the shore embankment. No doubt the last storms of autumn had uprooted the tree and washed it up here. Cautiously, they crept over to it. Mandred was too weak to pull Liodred’s body with him, and heavyhearted, he left his descendant where he lay. It was only a few steps.

  “Smell that?” asked Farodin as they crouched in the shelter of the tree trunk.

  Mandred could smell the snow. The odor of fire and cabbage soup hung in the air, but he found nothing unusual in that. He looked down to the ice and wondered what they were transporting on the sleds. What he wouldn’t give now for eggs and a few strips of bacon. And they had to have mead in those barrels. Mandred let out a sigh. A horn of mead. He thought of the oath he had sworn to Luth during the sea battle and smiled. He would not break his oath, but he would still drink.

  “It smells of brimstone,” Farodin finally said when he got no answer from Mandred. “Just like it smelled around the Devanthar. The whole world smells like him now.”

  “But you told me how you beat him. You told me how the sword fell apart.” Mandred pointed to the empty leather sheath at the elf’s belt. “It killed the Devanthar, didn’t it?”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “I’m cold,” said Nuramon in a low voice. His lips were blue, and he was shivering. “Why don’t we go over to those fields? It’s spring over there.”

  “There’s no cover on the ice,” Farodin said, speaking to Nuramon as if his comrade were a child. “The men back there want to hurt us. And they have found a way to get into Albenmark. We will get home another way. We’ll use the Albenstar that we used to get here, but it has changed. There’s a new path there, one that was created not very long ago. Emerelle must have drawn it with her Albenstone. I think she waited for us. She knew we would come here. The path is a sign for us. It will lead us to safety.”

  Across the fjord, the sky grew darker. Storm clouds surged from the west, over the mountains, but the sky in Albenmark remained a radiant blue.

  From the harbor came the sounds of pipes and drums. While the sleds were pulled up the ramp and onto the landing stages, a column of soldiers on the march appeared among the ships. To a man, they wore breastplates and high helmets. Their trousers and the sleeves of their jackets were oddly padded, but even stranger were their weapons. Each man carried a spear more than six paces long.

  The soldiers marched in a closed column, with eight pipers in the front row. Eight drummers followed the pipers. Mounted officers rode alongside the detachment, guiding them directly toward the rupture between the worlds.

  Mandred silently counted the rows of marching men. Nearly a thousand, all told. All heading to Albenmark. Behind them rolled high-wheeled wagons and a column of pack animals.

  “They’re mad,” Mandred declared, even as the long ranks of soldiers turned onto the path beside the ruined tower. “With spears like that in battle, all they’ll do is get in their own way.”

  “If you say so,” Farodin murmured, and he dug down lower behind the tree trunk. A cold wind blew across the fjord, and snow came with the clouds from the west. They crouched behind their meager cover and waited for night to come.

  Chilled through, they returned to the Albenstar on the beach. Liodred had disappeared under a thin shroud of snow. Mandred kneeled beside the dead king. At least he had been spared the sight of Firnstayn burned and occupied by their enemies.

  The jarl glanced at Farodin. He hoped they would not jump through time again. These damned gates. Everything was off kilter. An army attacking Albenmark. Terrible. How far had they been able to penetrate? Who would win this fight?

  A red-gold arch of light rose from the snow.

  “Quickly,” Farodin called, and he pushed Nuramon ahead of him into the gate.

  From the city wall sounded a signal horn. Mandred grabbed the dead king by his belt and pulled him through the snow. Liodred should have had his final rest
ing place in the burial mound, under the oak, the jarl thought bitterly. The dead of the royal line had been buried there for centuries. At least there Liodred would have returned to lie beside his wife and son.

  Mandred stepped into the light. He only needed to take a single step this time, then the smell of fresh green leaves welcomed the jarl to Albenmark. They stepped out of the gate and into a clearing damp with dew. Shadows rose along the edge of the woods. The air was filled with the scent of flowers and the twittering of birds.

  From beneath the pines stepped a young elf. He, too, wore one of the oddly slim swords at his hip, like the ones Mandred had noticed on the riders out on the fjord. The jarl looked back. The gate behind them had closed. Just a moment earlier it had been night, and now it was a bright morning. Mandred cursed silently. It had happened again. They’d jumped in time.

  “Who enters the heartland of Albenmark?” the elf called to them.

  “Farodin, Nuramon, and Mandred Aikhjarto. Our names are known well at the queen’s court, and that is also where we want to go,” Farodin confidently replied.

  The Great Gathering

  They made their way through the grass, slowly approaching the army camp that sprawled below the hill on which the queen’s palace stood. Hundreds of tents were pitched there, and beside every one fluttered a silken banner in the morning breeze. Mounted knights and infantry were gathered close by, and Albenkin of every sort moved among the tents, going about their business.