by Ross Lawhead
“No, he is a Simpson. His name is Alexander Douglas Simpson—Alex was named for him. He is twelve years older than I am—and five years older than James.”
“No. No, I definitely remember Ealdstan telling us about Gád.” She pointed a finger at Modwyn. “You lot had never heard of him, but Ealdstan said he is the oldest. The most dangerous of my foes.”
“I remember,” Modwyn said. “Ealdstan had his own reasons for saying that. He must have.”
“Which is another good question—where exactly is Ealdstan?”
“He left—before the invasion.”
“Do you have any idea where he went?”
Modwyn shook her head sadly.
“Really? Vivienne?”
“I had hoped that we might find some clue in his journals, but you know as well as I what we found there.”
“Why don’t I completely trust either one of you on that point?” Freya asked. “But getting back to Gád . . .” She shook her head, bewildered. “How? Why?”
“He grew up being taught the knowledge, as we all did, though it was clear he was the most passionate of our three siblings. He began to make excursions on his own, staying longer and longer each time—days at first, and then weeks. He went to university at St. Andrew’s in Edinburgh. He went down to read Medicine but began pursuing his own studies, digging deep into ancient texts, lore, and legends. He went on many excursions, both aboveground and below. At that stage, it was hard for us to keep track of him, being as independent as he was, but I suspect he also began to travel to the mythic Otherworld, or Elfland, of the fairy tales.
“He did not finish his studies. His final year was incomplete. He simply left his rooms one night of his first term and was not seen again for twenty years. We were worried, obviously, but he left no trace or clue as to where he went. Apart from alerting the authorities to his absence, there was naught we could do.
“The next we saw of him, he appeared much older than twenty years could account for—he had white hair and a much slighter frame—and yet he also seemed more vital. His eyes twinkled, his hands were fast and nimble. In this he gave the impression that Ealdstan himself gives, albeit to a lesser extent—a less intimidating extent.
“It was myself who bumped into him in the streets of Edinburgh. There is much of the city there that is still buried, besides the Arthur’s Seat tunnels, and it is my belief that he was living in one of these rabbit warrens—possibly near Candlemaker Row, beneath West Bow. That is a place with many dark secrets. I caught him by surprise and persuaded him, against his will, to take tea with me.”
“What did he say—where had he been?”
“He obviously was loath to share his history with me, and yet wished to appear as though he were being completely open. He is clever, and therefore did not give much away, but he had travelled into another world, he told me, in which time passed quicker than in this. He had learned secrets forgotten to these lands, as well as magics of his own.”
“Why was he doing that?” Freya asked. “What—what was he after?”
“That I did not find out. He claimed it was all his private interest.”
“But . . . ?”
“But for that I know him. Growing up, he would do nothing without purpose. He loved games, games of all sorts, and nothing was so important to him as to win his games. I say ‘his games,’ since he would make up rules to games he felt were too simple. We—James and I—would not play with him if we could help it, since he was a notorious cheat. Nothing, not even his own rules, would prevent him from winning.” She rubbed her forehead as if it pained her. “I paint him with a dark brush, but I love my brother—I do. But I certainly do not trust him.”
“What about the yfelgópes? Where did he pick those up from?”
“I know little of them. Somehow, in a way unknown to me, he has willed them over to his cause. He has great appeal to those with unforgiving minds that are full of checks and balances. Jealous minds in which mercy and grace do not fit—worldly minds of perfect justice.”
“Perfect justice doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It is the worst sin of this world—it does not allow for forgiveness.”
“Coming back to the Carnyx—what are we going to do about that? Are we still going to go after it?”
“You would need me to find that,” Modwyn said. “And I would not willingly contribute to the destruction of Niðergeard.”
“Modwyn, Niðergeard was destroyed as soon as Ealdstan left. He had eight years to come back and rescue you—rescue you all. But he didn’t come back—we did. We’re what you’ve got. Where’s the Carnyx?”
“Godmund took it. He is with it now. He will protect it with every muscle in his body until the moment of need.”
“Modwyn, my queen,” Vivienne said, “that moment is soon here. Ecgbryt and my nephew Alex are even now awakening an army of the greatest warriors this island has ever known. They are bringing them here directly, and we shall deliver this city from its invaders, track down my brother, and deliver him to justice—in whatever form that takes.”
Modwyn sat silently. Frithfroth, at the door, made no sound.
“Trust us. What other choice do you have?” Freya asked. “Because right now, now that your spirit is back in your body, I think that anyone at all could walk into this tower without any trouble.”
“It has been years since anyone attempted—”
“Maybe so, but Daniel just walked out there and he hasn’t come back. As terrible as it is to think it, he may have been captured. If so, people will be wondering where he came from.”
Modwyn looked down to the knife in Freya’s hand.
“I suppose you could try stabbing yourself again, if I let you have this—or I could do it for you. It might be a little more permanent if I do, though, me being mortal—a lifiende.”
“Leave me to consider,” Modwyn said after a moment’s thought. “I would contemplate alone for a while.”
Vivienne pulled Freya to the side and whispered to her in a low, urgent voice, “We need to find the Carnyx; that is the utmost priority of our mission. Nothing else matters as much as that. If she were somehow to escape, or do away with herself completely, we could never find it.”
Freya nodded and turned back to address Modwyn. “Personally, I don’t trust you enough to let you out of my sight. You can think about it, but we’re going to stay in this room with you while you do. Take your time, we’ll be quiet.”
Settling themselves on opposite sides of the room to Modwyn, the women steeled themselves for a long vigil as Modwyn settled back into her bed. Freya turned her back on the wall of lamps and folded her arms, placing her head against the wall beneath a shuttered window. Her mind was now weighing and evaluating the information she’d received. Things were getting started—they were getting closer to the Carnyx, Alex and Ecgbryt should be well on their way to gathering the rest of the knights, and Daniel? What had happened to him? When things happened, she got the feeling that they would happen quickly. She had the feeling that she would need as much rest as she could grab.
_____________________ III _____________________
Dawn broke, and Night released Daniel. He laid on the ground, cold, too exhausted even to shiver. He barely breathed; only the thinnest stream of air entered his lungs through his open, gaping mouth. Dew covered his body and the grass around him. He was aware, but thoughtless, his mind brutalised by the Night. He felt as if he could move, but he had no desire. His will had been completely pulverised.
He moved his hand—more of a jerk—just an inch. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to break him from his nearly catatonic state. He took a deep breath and pushed himself up—and vanished, becoming incorporeal. He was reminded once more that not all of him was in the world—that his soul, his mind, whatever part of his consciousness that made him him was still separate.
This again, he thought, with a sort of sigh. What had he gone through? All that pain just to—
It was that th
ought of pain and the suffering of his body that brought him back together, standing upright. He felt the leaden, painful, dreary weight of existence pulse with every beat of his heart as well as a deep weariness. He remembered the pain that had racked every cell of his body, and at last he was corporeal again.
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 Kæyle’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 Niðergeard, only scaled to his adult size.
“Kæyle?” 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 Kæyle?”
She recorked the bottle and turned to look at him, smiling and swaying. “Ha ha. Kæyle 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. “Kæyle 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 Kæyle away. That was the mistake that Kæyle 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, Kæyle 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 Kæyle. 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?
