Elven Queen

by Bernhard Hennen

  A young sorceress with long blond hair rose from among those waiting on the benches and took the dead man’s place. She dropped to her knees and lowered her head, resigning herself to her fate.

  “I see you have found your way to the Hall of Fire after all,” said a familiar voice behind Ollowain. He did not have to turn around to know who was there. Landoran stepped up beside him and looked down at the gathering of those doomed to die.

  “What is going on here?” Ollowain asked, deeply upset at what he had witnessed.

  “They are fighting for Phylangan, as your troops above us will soon be doing from the tunnels.”

  Ollowain squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. The image of the burning elf would not leave him. He’d seen other men burn . . . and suddenly the terrible images from Vahan Calyd returned. The vortex of flames . . . what was going on? Again, he was surrounded by fire.

  “You have to leave this place, my boy.”

  For the first time, Landoran addressed him in a way that sounded paternal and lacked disdain. My boy!

  “Come.” The prince of the Normirga took him gently by the shoulder. “Come. I will explain everything, but you have to leave here. In this place you cannot win, swordmaster.”

  Lyndwyn! She still had her head lowered. If only she would look up and see him. But no one in the cavern looked up. All their attention was focused on the floor beneath their knees.

  “We’ll talk, my son.”

  “But Lyndwyn . . . she can’t . . .” Again he saw in his mind the burning elf.

  “She cannot leave. If she were to go, it would be like tearing the keystone out of an archway. Everything would fall apart. Lyndwyn and the Albenstone cannot leave this place!”

  VAHELMIN IS YOUR NAME!

  Gundar gasped for air. His heart felt like it was about to burst from his chest. He was an old man! He couldn’t do this! That damned storm had trapped them at Wehrberghof for two days. Two days shut in with all those bodies, two days in which he’d been haunted by a dream the moment he closed his eyes. In it, he saw Firnstayn as if he were a bird flying over the village, and he landed on the gable of the jarl’s longhouse. The sun had just set behind the mountains. From between the wooden roof shingles, a spider crawled. It grew and grew, and spoke to him: “You have to tell him: ‘Vahelmin is your name!’ You have to tell him that he must take your light if he ever wants to become again what he once was. ‘Vahelmin is your name!’ Don’t forget it. And don’t be late!”

  Gundar blinked the snow out of his eyes. He trudged past his own hut. What a responsibility Luth had burdened him with. Him! An old man, not a warrior!

  There was a second dream, too. One in which he’d left Ulric behind in the snow. You have to do it, a voice had whispered in his head. Give up the boy’s life. You have to.

  That nightmare had almost become a reality. Ulric had stumbled. It had happened on the final section of the pass trail. The boy had sprained his ankle and hadn’t been able to go on. Gundar had begged and pleaded, and Ulric had tried pluckily, but there was just no way he could continue. For the first time in his life, the old priest had yelled at a child, but he could not bring himself to leave Ulric behind. Dark clouds had been gathering over the mountains in the north. The next storm was already on them, and they were still two hours from Firnstayn, plus two more if he’d sent help back immediately. That was too long to leave a child stranded on a snowy hillside. They’d left Wehrberghof before sunrise as it was and had made the descent as fast as they could.

  Ulric was sweating inside his coat just as much as Gundar was. Abandoning the boy in the middle of all that snow, leaving him for four hours . . . it would have meant certain death.

  Now Gundar held on to Ulric tightly. The old priest staggered. The only thing that drove him on was the anger that came from his refusal to accept that fate. He closed his eyes and pushed on. Up the final hill. Fifty steps. The boy was light, certainly much lighter than the gift of Luth they had dragged from the gap in the rock. It was the gift that was robbing him of breath. Everything hurt. His breath came in quick, despairing pants, like the gasps of a hunting dog chasing its quarry until it can go no farther.

  Gundar had to smile. It pleased him to imagine himself as Luth’s hunting dog. But a hunting dog at the end of its rope . . . and what was it again that the voice in the dream had said?

  “Vahelmin is your name.”

  “What’s the matter?” Ulric asked. “Who do you mean?”

  Gundar leaned his head against the door of the longhouse. He’d made it up the hill! Admittedly, he could not remember how he’d made it to the top, but he was there. Still wheezing, he set the boy on his feet.

  Relieved of the boy now, Gundar tried to breathe in with relief, but an iron clamp had wrapped around his heart. The god’s gift was crushing him, but he could not give up now.

  “Please, Luth,” he managed to mutter. “Please, give me strength.”

  Gundar pushed the door open. He was met by a stuffy warmth and the smell of a beechwood fire. He pushed the heavy curtain of the boot room aside and almost fell. His fingers clawed at the coarse fabric. There it was! The monster! It was standing in front of Asla, who had a wooden ladle in her hand and looked as if she were going to swing it at the apparition.

  “Vahelmin is your name!” Gundar croaked.

  The dreadful beast turned to him. Its head really did have something wolf-like to it. The monster stared at him for the blink of an eye, and beneath its stare, Gundar felt a trembling in him that went down to the marrow of his bones. This was the darkness given form. The evil!

  The wolfhorse turned away again. It snapped at Asla’s belly.

  “Vahelmin is your name!” The curtain slid through Gundar’s fingers. His knees gave way. “You have to take my light if you want to go back to what you once were. Remember! Vahelmin is your name!” the priest wheezed with his final breath.

  Ulric pushed past him. He held the elven dagger in both hands and hobbled into the parlor.

  The wolfhorse turned. With a leap, it crossed the room. Its body glided through Ulric’s, and the boy fell to the floor. Gundar spread his arms wide. He looked into the beast’s gaping maw. Its daggerlike teeth sank into his chest. The iron band around his heart burst. Cold penetrated every part of him. The hair of his beard crackled, and a blue light engulfed him. Then there was a strange smell in the air, as if a thunderstorm had passed. The blue light was gone, and the ghost had vanished with it.

  Gundar looked up at the ceiling of the boot room. He must have fallen backward, but he could not remember hitting the floor.

  Asla’s face appeared above him. She really was a beautiful woman. The priest no longer felt exhausted. Now the elf woman was by him, too. If he were a younger man . . . she was opening his doublet!

  Someone pushed a blanket under his neck. His head tilted backward, and he lost sight of the elf. No . . . suddenly she was above him again. Their lips touched. He’d never dared dream of such a thing—being kissed by an elf woman! It must be her way of showing her gratitude for him saving her queen. That horrible wolfhorse would surely have killed everyone in the longhouse.

  “What is that?” That was Asla’s voice, Gundar thought. “He’s got a rusty old chain mail shirt on. Erek, help me. We have to get it off him.”

  The elf woman leaned over him closely again. She held one cheek very close to his mouth. Then she straightened up a little and gazed at him with her beautiful dark eyes.

  “He’s not breathing.” The elf spoke the words in such a pretty singsong way. Gundar felt like smiling, but he was too tired. What lovely eyes she had! And the pupils, black as charcoal. They looked as if they could swallow him up. Yes. Things were getting dark now. Was he falling? No. There was a light. A longhouse made of gold. What a magnificent hall it was! The great winged doors stood wide open. Gundar heard the joyful sounds of voices and feasting from inside. The smell of roasting meat filled his nose, and his mouth watered. He hadn’t had a decent meal for far too
long!

  It would be good to take his place at the table, to eat, and then rest awhile.

  THE TAMED FIRE

  Landoran led Ollowain back through the stone forest to the stairway. The prince would probably have liked to put the Hall of Fire farther behind them, but at the bottom of the stairs, Ollowain stopped.

  “Enough.” No word had passed between them until then. What had begun with eloquent silence, and with the feeling that his father really had Ollowain’s well-being most in mind when he led him away from the kneeling sorcerers, slowly grew into the same oppressive wordlessness that had existed between them ever since the mysterious death of his mother. “What is going on back there?”

  His father seemed even more exhausted than usual. He slumped onto a stone bench, leaned back against the wall, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Why do you think, in your childhood, you never had to use a spell to protect yourself from the cold in the rock fortresses of Carandamon? Deep below the ice flows liquid fire. And as long as our people have lived in this land of eternal ice, we have used the power that hidden fire gives us. We create geysers and catch the boiling water in a network of pipes that lie concealed behind the rock walls. In the larger caverns, we erected hollow columns, and in this way, we made the warmth of the inner earth radiate even into the last corners of our fortresses. But fire is fickle. It is not unlike living with a cat. She’ll gift you cozy moments, maybe even lull you into believing you understand her and can predict how she’ll behave. And then, when you think you feel safe around her, she’ll suddenly sink her teeth into your skin or slash you with her claws, and you can’t understand why she did it. The fire deep below us is the same. It has warmed us for centuries. Now it wants to burn us to ash.”

  “I know better than most of our race what it feels like to freeze,” Ollowain replied angrily. “And I knew even as a child where the heat in the walls of Carandamon’s fortresses came from. You don’t have to explain it to me, Father. I once lived here in Phylangan, too. What makes Phylangan any different from the others? The Hall of Fire . . . there’s nothing like that in any of the other fortresses.”

  “The stone forest is part of an old volcano. Deep beneath our feet is an enormous cave filled with lava. It is under pressure, and the liquid rock is forcing its way upward through an underground vent.” Landoran sighed. “The entire mountain is riven by a network of cracks and gaps, not to mention all the pipes we ourselves have created in the rock to be able to use the heat from below. Now gases are coming up. Boiling water is starting to erupt from the pillars in the Skyhall, and sulfur has risen into the lake and poisoned everything in it. But all that is just the beginning. Beneath our feet, a force is building that could blow this mountain apart.”

  Ollowain listened to his father with growing dread. This was far beyond his most horrific imaginings. His father’s weary calm irritated him to the point of fury. How could he just sit there, exhausted, but so obviously smug? They had to evacuate Phylangan while there was still time! “When do we start moving the troops out through the Sky Harbor?”

  “You want to give up?” Landoran looked up at him in disbelief. “You want to hand the most magnificent of all our rock castles over to its destruction? We’ve been in a similar situation before, twice in fact. Each time, we had to battle the fire, and each time, we made it through. We’ll survive this time, too.”

  “Like that sorcerer I just watched burn.”

  “Sacrifices must be made,” the prince replied flatly. “As a soldier, that should come as no surprise to you. Or have you never sent troops to certain death in battle for no other reason than to buy time and finally win a glorious victory?”

  Ollowain wondered just how much his father knew about him. The question was no coincidence. “I, at least, would not call a victory won like that glorious.”

  “Don’t give me that, boy! If you really thought that way, you would never have dedicated yourself heart and soul to the art of war. A man who leads an army into battle knows the price of victory. The sorcerer who burned to death down there had a name: Taenor. His talents were mediocre at best. And as we saw, he did not pass into the moonlight, which means he will be reborn, maybe into a body in which he can develop greater powers. What else does a death like that mean if not the gift of a new beginning?”

  “And what of the kobolds, the centaurs, and the humans? None of them can hope for a new life. You’re gambling with fire, and they are your stake. How can you do that?”

  Landoran smiled with disdain. “I have forced no one to fight for us here. They came, and I accepted their offer of help with gratitude. I did. I’ll even admit that I have to rely on them because our own people are not strong enough to fight down here and from the walls at the same time.”

  “You have to tell them the truth,” Ollowain insisted.

  “Why? They can’t change anything that is going on down here. If they know about this, it will only weaken those who are already vacillating. I’m keeping it from them for their own protection.”

  “Then at least the war council should know.”

  “A gathering in which your human friend has surrounded himself with men like that fellow with half a nose? No, Ollowain. It’s bad enough that we have to rely on the humans’ help. We’re not about to start sharing our secrets with them as well. That man—Lambi’s his name, isn’t it?—he will tell his men. In two days, everyone will know, and panic will break out. Breathe a word about what’s happening in the Hall of Fire, and Phylangan will fall before the first troll is standing at our gates.”

  Ollowain let out a heavy sigh. His father’s misgivings were not easily dismissed. “It is not right to lie to one’s allies,” he said quietly.

  “But we are not lying to anyone.” Landoran had adopted an encouraging, fatherly tone, as if he were talking to a child. “We’re concealing something, yes, but what of it? Do you know everything about the soldiers who fight for you? That is the leader’s burden. We see further than most of those who serve us. We have a deeper understanding of the world, of everything going on around us. To protect those we lead, we cannot share all our knowledge with them. Besides, nobody gives away all their secrets.”

  Ollowain clenched his fist in anger. “What difference do the secrets of one random human make to me? They are not threatening my life! You cannot compare these things.”

  “Don’t come to me with your chivalrous tripe!” Landoran snapped. “But honor among allies aside, I actually agree with you. We should not compare ourselves with humans. Alfadas and his fighters will never understand us. Don’t get me wrong—I do not reproach them for that. I’ll go further and say that it would be a mistake on my part if I were to demand an understanding of which they are simply incapable. So I am not about to pester them with explanations about things that, at best, they would find uncanny. I don’t even know how to explain to you what is going on in the Hall of Fire, considering that you have never managed to cast a spell in your life.”

  “I was expecting that. Every time we talk, we always come to this.” Ollowain turned away and stepped onto the landing at the base of the stairs. Every argument with his father led to the point where Landoran found fault with him for being unable to work magic. His father was one step away from including him in his musings about humans and all the other simple beings that would never sip from the spring of true wisdom.

  “Don’t run off, you mule. You call yourself a warrior, don’t you, swordmaster? Then face the truth! How would you explain daylight to a blind man?” the prince shouted angrily at his back. “One has to engage in certain experiences because they cannot be put into words. Or would you be able to explain to me what binds you and Lyndwyn? I can see into your heart, my son. Please, don’t walk away now.”

  Ollowain stopped on the first step.

  “I don’t know how I am supposed to make something comprehensible to you that you have never experienced,” Landoran said. He was on his feet now. He supported himself against the wall with one hand, as if
he might collapse at any moment. For the first time, Ollowain saw his father marked by age. He was too weak to hide it anymore.

  “I would never reproach you if I were unable to understand what you say, Father. What separates us, though, is that you have never even tried.”

  “All right . . . magic, then . . . it begins with a descent into a deep meditative state. You try to leave your prison of flesh and blood behind you and to find inside that part of you that is immortal. And if you can do that, it is like a rebirth. You feel as if you are moving out of your body, and you see yourself from outside. Petty needs like hunger and thirst no longer plague you, nor do you still have a body dictating endless obligations to you to make up for all its shortcomings. A feeling of overwhelming freedom comes over you. And then you hear the singing of the world. And you feel it, too, as strange as that may sound when I talk about a song. You become aware of the power of the magic that permeates everything. Freed from your body, you are able to work the purest magic because you can be one with this mysterious power, you can be in harmony with it. From the outside, one sees your crouching figure, and that is all. One who has never opened the inner eye, the magical eye, is unable to see whether you have departed from your body.” Landoran had grown even paler than usual as he spoke. His words came in broken bursts but with great passion.

  “When you are down in the Hall of Fire, you hear a voice call you the instant you leave your body. It issues no command, and yet the voice is impossible to resist. It draws you down, down where the eternal fire burns deep beneath these mountains. Suddenly, you are part of something huge—the elation, fears, and memories of love of a hundred lives wash over you. You’re confused at first, but everything suddenly falls into place. You are part of a great choir. What makes you who you are shrinks to a tiny spark of memory that all but fades away when confronted by this immense melody to which you now belong.