by Ross Lawhead
“Freya,” Vivienne said, her mouth twisting slightly, “Gád’s my brother.”
_____________________ III _____________________
“You are not dead,” the unknown, imperious figure beside Agrid Fiall assured Daniel.
“Are you sure about that? I just journeyed through all of creation and spent an evening floating in a disembodied cloud around a field.”
“You’d be dead if I had any power at all in the matter,” Agrid informed him. “I’ll do everything within my power to make you wish you were.”
“If you were dead, this conversation would occur somewhere else,” said the unknown elf.
“Somewhere much more uncomfortable for all of us,” Stowe said grimly.
“But we’re in Elfland?” Daniel said. “Why am I here?”
“Because when you were last here, you took something that didn’t belong to you, which you were specifically warned not to do.”
“No . . .” Daniel said. “No, I don’t think I did. I was very careful to—”
“You took our lives, you empty-headed fool,” Fiall interrupted him. “Oh, don’t give me that look. Certainly our lives aren’t something you could put in your pocket, but did you honestly, seriously think that you could blithely go around killing whomever you pleased and not feel the effects of it?”
“But the merchant—Reizger Lokkich—he said it would be all right, that I wouldn’t have any trouble going back after I did.”
Stowe chuckled. “And you believed him?”
“What about you? I killed you in my world.”
“Oh, I’m just here for the show.”
“You will have a reckoning in your world as soon as you have had one in ours,” Agrid said.
“It isn’t quite as Agrid states it,” the third elf said. “Your actions came at a cost to your soul—and now your soul must pay the price.”
“Who are you?” Daniel asked, looking him up and down. “I remember Agrid Fiall—Agrid Fiall who wanted to buy me and keep me as a pet—but I don’t remember you.”
“I was there.” The elf tilted his noble face upward. “I was following behind Fiall to relieve myself. I heard the explosions from the device that slew him—slew him almost instantly—and then you turned your machine at me. One piece of metal hit my chest.” He pulled at his cloak and revealed a white, smooth chest that suddenly warped and contorted before Daniel’s eyes, turning into a livid, diseased, purple-green infected hole. The skin separated in the centre of the ugly whorl and oozed puss and blood.
“Another,” the figure continued, “struck me here.” He passed a hand across his face and it was transformed to show a gash running from the edge of his chin up to his cheek and over his ear. The sickening discolouration filled the whole side of his face; his eye was blood red, with a completely black pupil.
Daniel breathed out and looked away.
“I did not die quickly. I lingered inside my body as they fought to keep it alive—surgeons, herbalists, healers, enchanters—but none of them had any powers over the poisonous metal that had entered my body. It took days, and I myself struggled no less desperately than they, but in the end I gave way to the inevitable and died.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel saw his face change back to the fine, unmarred, porcelain-like features of a few moments ago.
Daniel swallowed. “Were you a servant? Or a guard?” he asked. The elf’s bearing, his manner, suggested something regal, and Daniel had already begun to suspect, before the words were even out of the other’s mouth.
“I was not. I was Prince Lhiam-Lhiat. You assassinated one of the royal line.”
Daniel winced. “I’m . . . sorry?” he said.
“Are you though? You must think it, I’m sure, but can you say you wouldn’t do it again? Seriously consider that, right now, before you answer.”
Daniel did think about it a moment. “You’re right, I would do it again.”
Lhiam-Lhiat smiled and nodded. “You do not lie. Good. I thought you would not be regretful. But tell me why.”
“Why not? You were evil, all of you, and this world—any world—is better for you not being in it.”
“Spiteful little pup!” Fiall spat venomously. “I’ll see you regret those words!” He leapt at Daniel, springing high into the air. Trying to twist out of the way, Daniel fell back but was too slow. The enraged elf’s outstretched hands met his chest and Daniel toppled backward. He hit the ground with Fiall’s knees on his chest. He saw hands raised against the evening sky, curled claw-like as they descended, slashing at his face and neck.
But there was no pain. Or, Daniel also saw, blood. Fiall’s fingers just bounced off of him with no effect or damage to either of them. When he realised this, he just laid back and let Fiall impotently continue. Fiall’s rage gradually fell from him and he stopped. Daniel shifted his weight, pushed Fiall off of him, and then stood. Fiall was on one side of him, Lhiam-Lhiat and Stowe on the other.
“That was fun. I guess. Is that what this is, then?” Daniel asked. “I’m going to be haunted by you and shown the error of my ways? Have a miraculous change of heart and find enlightenment? Are you going to show me my past, present, and future so I can see what a ruthless monster I am? Will you take me on a tour of all the lives I’ve destroyed because of my actions and reveal the connectedness and nobility of life? That might be entertaining. Go ahead, bring it on, because you’re right, I’m not sorry, and I would do it again. I’m not an idiot. I know what I am. You think I don’t? You think I haven’t thought long and hard about what I’ve done, what I’ve set myself to do? I’m not some selfish, unexamined soul!” Daniel said, his voice rising. He drew his sword. “I’m a hero! So bring it on! I’ll take you and the whole universe on! Win or lose, I don’t care. I’m fighting on the side of good! It may not always be pleasant, but it is always right!”
Daniel stood opposite the two tall, gaunt, marble-like apparitions, his eyes blazing. He felt the electric fire of righteousness racing though him. Lhiam-Lhiat was smiling at him in that smug, self-satisfied way of his. Fine, let him keep smiling. Daniel wasn’t a man to be intimidated by that. But . . . Agrid Fiall was also smiling, the exact same smile—and for some reason that rattled him.
The sky seemed to be growing darker.
“Do you know,” Fiall said, “I do believe I’m going to enjoy this far more than I previously imagined.”
“This isn’t a lesson,” Lhiam-Lhiat said to him. “This isn’t forgiveness or an atonement—those rules work differently in this place. This is punishment, pure and simple.”
There was a twisting feeling in Daniel’s gut. The righteous fire of defiance inside of him faltered slightly. “Torture? Doesn’t matter, I’ll get through it somehow. I’ve got friends here, and in other places. They’ll find me and rescue me. I can hold out until then. I can survive. I can escape.”
“Can you run?” Fiall asked him.
“What?” Daniel asked.
Fiall’s eyes shifted to look behind Daniel, and Daniel turned. Behind him, the sun had been setting; minutes ago, deep reds and golden yellows lit the sky. Now the cold, purple expanse of twilight filled the air above him, and on the horizon—dark. But it wasn’t the dark that was an absence of light; it was the horrible, running darkness that chases after you in nightmares. It was darkness that had an edge to it—and a sharp edge, with teeth and claws. Although it was still a far ways off, and only flickering slightly, Daniel knew with the untold certainty of a nightmare that the darkness was alive, and angry, and coming after him.
“What is that?”
“When you were a child, were you ever afraid of the dark? It was because you had not forgotten the realm that came before existence. That is Night.”
“What does it want?”
“You. Forever.”
Daniel started running. He ran as fast and as long as he could, which was considerable, since he didn’t tire here, but he couldn’t outrun the turn of the planet.
The Night was
behind him. Its arms reached for him and its jaws strained for him.
Daniel’s feet desperately pounded the ground. He had looked back once and almost burst into tears; he didn’t know exactly why, but the hard, bank of blackness was terrifying, bristling with unknown horrors that he somehow, instinctively, knew would destroy him.
He felt the chill on his back as darkness creeped in around him. He thought the fear entered into him then, but it didn’t; it merely quickened the panic already in Daniel’s breast, like a sympathetic note vibrating on the fear string of his heart.
And then the Night reached out and grabbed him, physically, reaching an inconceivably cold hand into his chest and yanking backward. Unable to breathe, Daniel flung his arms out into the darkness.
He only had a second to acknowledge the terror before pain became his world. He felt his skin tear, like it was being stripped, torn off of him one thread at a time, layer by layer, leaving the raw flesh beneath exposed. The pain was so excruciating he wished he would dissipate, like earlier. He cursed his body, his useless, pointless body that now only seemed to exist in order to house the pain.
He was screaming—at least, he thought he was screaming. He could hear nothing. The Night and its pain blocked out all noise.
He tumbled in torment for countless hours. Days? How could he stop the pain? How could he manage it? Could it be avoided? Transcended? If he could only think clearly for a moment . . .
And then, it stopped. The pain left him—but left him raw, aching, and brutally cold. It was too dark to see. He feared moving, so he just drifted. The blood in his ears thumped with the echoes of pain and the sounds of his sobs.
A grey blur floated before his eyes. He blinked to clear them and found the Elfin moneylender standing before him.
“Are you sure I’m not dead?” Daniel asked Agrid—more croaked—and he realised that he asked it in English, not Elvish. But that didn’t seem to matter.
“Fairly certain.”
Daniel sighed. “Really? How do I know I can trust you?”
Agrid Fiall smiled. “If you can’t trust the dead, whom can you trust?”
Daniel hazarded a movement and brought his hand to his face. Contrary to what every nerve ending told him, his skin was still attached to the rest of his body, as well as somehow illuminated in the dark.
“What happens now?” Daniel asked. “You said punishment. Is this what it’s going to be? Torture? You just keep going until I break? Is there more to come?” Or is it over? he hoped, but couldn’t ask.
“My friend,” said the moneylender with a leer. “You haven’t begun yet.”
“More pain?” Daniel asked, and felt tears in his eyes.
“Perhaps. Is pain the worst that can happen to you?”
“I don’t know. It feels like it.”
“If you do not fear anything more than pain, then you are blessed.”
“Right now I can’t think of anything worse than what just happened to me. What was it?”
“You don’t fear solitude?”
The moneylender disappeared.
“Silence?”
And Daniel heard nothing more.
He tried to call out, but no sound came. He shouted, clapped, hummed, even whistled, but nothing registered in his ears. He felt for them, and they were still there. He clicked his fingers, clapped—there wasn’t even the ring of silence.
Time, interminable, passed. Touch, physical sensation, was a comfort, and then it was a torment. All other senses lost, except for the one that was sensitive to pain, to cold, to fear.
In despair, no sight or sound to console him, he floated in a sea of nothing.
_____________________ IV _____________________
Alex stood in the centre of a ring of nearly two hundred heavily armed warriors. Behind him were the thirty-some knights with whom he’d been travelling the forgotten paths of England and Europe. The hundred and fifty or so before him were the knights they had found sleeping under what he thought was Blanik Mountain in the Czech Republic.
Alex conducted the negotiations in Latin, which he had thought would be fairly standard, but had almost immediately uncovered a wealth of small differences in pronunciation and formulation. In any case, they were communicating. Mostly.
“We require you to fight with us,” Alex said to a slight, dark-complexioned knight in ornate, Slavic armour. “In Britain. We are under attack. Many of our warriors are killed, dead where they slept undisturbed for almost a thousand years, murdered by the great evil that is growing there. We need our brothers in arms to avenge them, to help us plug a great spring of darkness that if left unchecked now will flood all of Europe—all the world. It is by joining us now that we have a chance to stop this tide of destruction.”
The Slavic knight related some or all of Alex’s impassioned speech to the knights behind him, who were peering attentively at the new knights who’d invaded their hidden chamber.
A discussion broke out among them when the knight had finished his translation. It grew into a clamour, and then the leader waved his hands for quiet.
“We cannot come with you,” he said sternly. “We wait for Wenceslaus.”
“Who’s he?”
“Our commander and king. When the great conflict comes, and when all Czech people argue and two cannot be found who agree on any one matter—when Blanik Forest burns and blood fills Pusty Lake—then will Wenceslaus rise from where he sleeps, claim the sword of Bruncvik, and crack open this mountainside. We will ride out, with him commanding us, and chase our nation’s enemies into the farthest ocean. But not before then will we leave this place.”
“Tell them this,” Ecgbryt said to Alex, and Alex began translating: “Let me assure you of the danger that will surely come to this world. There are gaps in the walls between the worlds, where those who keep the gates have no authority.”
“We have no knowledge of these things,” the knight said, this time without relaying Alex’s words to his comrades. “We shall stay here.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said, turning to Ecgbryt. “I was under the impression that Ealdstan was responsible for all of these knights. But either his breadth of interest was much wider than I had credited him, or there are more players at work here than I originally conceived.”
“I would not know,” Ecgbryt answered. “I was asleep most of the last thousand years.”
“It’s something to bear in mind, I think,” Alex concluded. He gave the Czech chief one more questioning glance, then turned to tell the rest of the company what the man had said, and the information trickled down the line as it was translated and retranslated into the three archaic languages that the men spoke.
“Leave them,” Berwin said, stepping forward. He was starting to assume the position of a sort of deputy commander or captain to Alex and Ecgbryt’s dual leadership. He seemed to speak most of the languages that actually mattered on this jaunt and took it upon himself to organise practical aspects, like where and how to set up camps when they bedded for the night. Not that they did that, much. None of the awakened knights, Ecgbryt included, seemed to need much sleep; it made sense, Alex acknowledged; however, he was getting far less than his necessary seven hours a night, and fatigue was starting to overtake him.
“Their ways are not ours,” Berwin said. “We would not journey from our realm to help them; what reason have we for asking them to leave theirs?”
Alex frowned. Berwin had a point, but still . . . a hundred and fifty knights—that was more than he had ever heard of in one place before. More than was probably still left in Britain, in total.
“Please,” Alex beseeched. “There are trolls, dragons, giants, and all manner of malicious spirits infesting our country. With your help, they would be eradicated swiftly, and you would be back here soon and none would be the wiser. What say you? For honour’s sake?”
The last request was relayed with a smirk by the dark complexioned knight. There were grunts and scoffs.
“That was the w
rong tack,” Berwin intimated to Alex and Ecgbryt. “Slovak knights have always viewed the signposts of honour askew. Their ways are not ours.”
“We owe no debts to your island race,” the Slavic knight responded. “If your small outpost were to disappear overnight, who would notice? We here are the keystone of the arch of civilisation. Were we to falter, the whole would tumble away into oblivion.”
“In an arch,” Alex replied, “each stone is as vital as the other. Send just a small band of your men to join with ours.”
An argument seemed to break out when this request was translated. Knights on both sides of the translator shouted and made wild gesticulations. He raised his hands for quiet once more.
“Them, take them,” he said, and pointed to a corner of the massive cavern. Eight knights were standing quite apart from the rest of them, incongruously clad in medieval plate armour. “They call themselves the Hussites. We can hardly understand them, and we don’t know why they were sent to us. They have strange opinions and are always causing arguments with us about topics that we know nothing about and care for even less. If we convince them to go with you, will you take them?”
Alex shrugged. “If that’s the best offer we can get, then yes—of course.”
There then followed a very long period of bartering and explaining to the eight rather baffled knights.
“So,” said the dark knight after the awkward Hussites had been, to all appearances, completely bullied into joining Alex and Ecgbryt’s ragtag band of warriors. “All has been explained to them. They will follow you and take part in your battles. They are good warriors—they are of the Boiohaemum, after all. When you have done with them . . . keep them, send them home, do whatever. But remember always that you owe a debt to the Knights of Blanik Mountain, Alex Son-of-Simp.”
Alex bowed, and with a grudging amicability restored, they left the enormous cavern under the mountain and continued their northward course.
CHAPTER TEN
