Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (25 page)

*

The flight was as short as Gelert had predicted. They had hardly spent fifteen minutes cruising supersonic before the ship shook with subsonic reinsertion. It was still strange to do it in such near-complete silence, except for the roar of air past the craft’s hull, and even that was muted to a faint demure rushing sound like air conditioning. 
Another technology they’ve declined to share with the rest of us. I wonder, did
 
they get it from the Xainese?. ..
 For Xaihon was as protective of its universe’s monopoly on space travel and space technologies as Alfheim was of fairy gold. 
Possibly these two cultures have better
 
grounds for understanding each other than the rest of us know…

They were dropping into a landscape of mountains tall enough to be snowcapped even at this time of year, in these latitudes; Alfheim’s version of the Alps. Where in Lee’s world those mountains were as full of the marks of civilizations as anyplace else, now she looked down out of the window and saw no sign of roads or habitations, nothing at all—a white waste lined here and there with green valleys, but the valleys were empty.

On the southern side of the great Alpine watershed, though, the picture began to change as their craft dropped lower. The character of the mountains changed, too; they became lower, the valleys wider and greener, and now signs of life began to appear—small handsome cities, valleys wide enough for cultivation, roads winding among the peaks. And then, without warning, the character of the mountains changed.

Before they had been more like the Rockies, granite or basalt, dark gray or almost black in places, an older, volcanic stone in stepped peaks and great massifs. Now, suddenly, as the craft descended, Lee found herself looking at a sharper, more dangerous landscape, a maze of upward-pointing daggers of white stone set against a cloudless blue sky. At the heart of one cluster of those daggers, almost as if set there for protection, a collection of sharp-pointed gems in greens and blues reached upward, glittering in the day: Aien Mhariseth, the Alfen’s oldest settlement in Europe, and the ancient home and seat of power of the Elf-Kings.

All their group were standing in the craft’s aisles now to look down at the view, or leaning against the windows. Lee felt no surprise to glance over her shoulder and see that dil’Hemrev was nearby again, looking at the staggering landscape with the gently amused expression of someone watching the reaction of tourists to a beauty she had herself long come to take for granted. Their eyes did not meet as Lee glanced back, but she knew that the Elf was waiting to discover what else Lee might see.

Standing behind dil’Hemrev, looking over her shoulder, Per Olafssen said, “These are the Italian preAlps, aren’t they?”

“Close. But we’re a little farther south, and a little farther west,” dil’Hemrev said. “If the equivalencies were complete, it would be the area around Latemar, in your world—not too far from Bolzano, in the Italian Tyrol. But in our universe Bolzano, or Dalasthe as we call it, remained just a little settlement. Probably it’s because the course of the Adige river runs differently here, farther east into what would be the Grödner Dolomites. With us, it was Aien Mhariseth that became the main trading center, because of the way the river and the pass road came together nearby.”

Lee filed the information away absently as the craft made a broad circle around the city, losing more altitude. Aien Mhariseth resembled Ys only in that some of the materials, metals and stone, looked like those used there. Otherwise, the building style was mostly different. The majority of the buildings were older, blunter, crouching down into the hollow under the mountain walls. In the center of the city, a double handful of towers reached up; newer buildings, Lee thought, meant to echo the natural surroundings in a more ordered architectural idiom. They were handsome enough. But to her eye the effect had failed, for those spires were effortlessly dominated and overshadowed by the spines and thorns of stone uprearing all around. The stone was pale, an ancient coral-based limestone identical with that of the Dolomites in Lee’s own world. Once upon a time, all this had lain beneath the warm waters of the prehistoric sea that covered Europe. But the fires under the world had stirred, and the planet’s skin had heaved upward, shrugging the sea away. The calcified coral of the seabed had cracked and shattered, great layers of it tilting up onto their sides, as the floor of that part of the world abruptly became its walls. Millions of years’ erosion had fretted slowly at those walls, peeling them back and down along the now-vertical layers, so that Aien Mhariseth was completely fenced about with narrow peaks and pinnacles, jagged needles of stone like upthrust swords and spears, white or palest gray. Here and there among them an occasional patch of green lay nestled in some broad yoke or saddleback between the greater chain of peaks; but elsewhere were only boulders in a hundred sizes, gravel and rubble, and huge fans of gray scree scattered down the mountainsides.

But here and there, too, as they swung closer around the great jagged wall that stood up directly behind Aien Mhariseth, sheltering it to the north, Lee began to see the patches of crimson clinging to the sheer stone. Only the very highest peaks were free of it just now. Elsewhere the color became less of a patchwork, almost an unbroken blanket in places, in purple or carmine or a dark dusky rose. At the sight of the color, once again Lee felt that terrible disorienting grip of pain at the heart, as if she were suddenly remembering a loss she had suffered long ago, and had, unconscionably, forgotten. But the feeling affected her less strongly today, either because she had been here for a little while now, or because she recognized it as possibly some kind of weapon…in any case, as something more than just the effect of transit between worlds. 
And it’s worse here
, Lee thought. 
Had we experienced this on our first day, it
 
would have simply left us all nonfunctional. But why is it stronger here?

“Oh, isn’t that beautiful,” Mellie Hopkins was saying, and then she sniffed, and wiped a tear away. “It’s all pink…”

Lee smiled. 
As good a time as any to push the issue a little.
 “The Elf-King’s roses…” she said. “Or one variety of them, anyway.”

“Yes, we had quite a display the other night, didn’t we? The conditions were just right.” Dil’Hemrev smiled, completely innocently. “I wish I could say we arranged it for you, but very few of us are quite that accomplished.”

Lee didn’t even dare glance at dil’Hemrev at that point. 
Just what are you trying to pull?
 she thought.
Why are you in such a rush all of a sudden to get me to incriminate myself? And who are you
 
working for, really?
 For she couldn’t get rid of the sense that dil’Hemrev was feeling pressured in some way…and that there was more to it than just whatever orders dil’Hemrev might have from ExAff. 
So do
 
I take the bait?
 Lee thought. It was tempting, but she had no idea how such a brazen betrayal of what she could see and couldn’t might affect matters.

“What are you on about?” Mellie said. “Never knew you were a gardener, Lee.”

“Believe me, I’m not,” Lee said. “You should see 
my
 roses. It’s just something from an old story that some central Europeans made up to explain the alpenglow. When you have sunset and
—
” Lee decided not to make life easy for dil’Hemrev by coming right out and saying “a mountain range.” “
—
and high clouds in the right orientation to one another, sometimes it makes it look like the landscape is glowing internally. It lasts a while after local nightfall, because of the height of the clouds. People used to say those were the Elf-King’s roses showing through from the next world.”

“That happen the night we came? It would have been lost on me,” Mellie said. “I don’t remember a thing after dropping my bags and checking where the plumbing was. I was wrecked.” Mellie looked down again as the craft began to circle lower, toward a green spot at the edge of the city. “Those can’t be real roses, though, can they. Not up here: it’d be too cold. This has to be a subalpine environment…”

“You’re right, of course,” dil’Hemrev said. “I wouldn’t be an expert, but those are a little low shrubby kind of plant that blooms this time of year. A kind of giant heather, I think you’d call them. They’re very tough; they go right up past the snow line, and spend most of the year covered by snow, except for this little window of time when they bloom in a hurry. The name suggests that they got tangled up with the old legend somehow, probably when people found out that there weren’t real roses up there in their own worlds. And of course there weren’t any here in our world either; they couldn’t have survived. Just a fairy tale…” Dil’Hemrev smiled indulgently.

Gelert had put his head over Lee’s shoulder. 
Pushing the issue, are we?

Why not? Mellie gave me the opening.

No argument. Just you be careful…
 “It looks like nice walking country,” Gelert said.

“It’s very popular among those of our people who enjoy hiking,” dil’Hemrev said. “I’d be glad to speak to someone and have them take you up there in your free time, if you like.”

Lee thought she understood the message: 
There’s nothing there of any importance at all, and we
 
want you to see that for yourself.
 “Certainly,” Lee said. “If there’s some spare time in the next few days, I’d enjoy the opportunity. Gel?”

“Absolutely. I could use a good run in the park.”

Dil’Hemrev nodded as if there was nothing unusual about this at all, and went farther back in the craft to talk to some others of the committee members. Lee didn’t glance at Gelert, but via her implant she said: 
If
 
I was uncertain before, I’m not now. The way she came back to the question of any “real” roses
 
being here tells me she knows about my caller. The only question is how. Which Alfen intelligence
 
agency has the comms in my house bugged? Or have they already pulled my caller in and had
 
ExAff wring him dry?

For our sake, I hope not,
Gelert said.
They’d probably have enough cause under their jurisdictional laws to
 
chuck us in the clink right now. But I don’t think they’d like to do that… for the same reason your
 
bluff worked just now.

Well, we’ll see…

“The city looks like it’s been here for a long time,” Per said, sitting down across the aisle and a seat or two up from Lee and Gelert.

“Since our version of the Bronze Age,” dil’Hemrev said, all polished tour guide again. “Our oldest fairy gold mines are here; not mined anymore, of course, since the area’s now protected under cultural heritage statutes. And some of the buildings are very old indeed.” She indicated one in particular, set actually into the huge wall of stone, high up on an inward-leaning spur of stone that stood perhaps fifty meters above the floor of the small valley that the peaks encircled.
“Ealvien dil’Lavrinhad,”
she said, “the Laurins’ House. Its oldest parts are now five thousand years old; it’s the oldest continuously inhabited structure on the planet.”

They all peered at it as the craft came down toward its landing site, in the shadow of what was a much more grand and impressive building, arched and porticoed like something out of ancient Greece, though the arches were more Gothic than Hellenic. Lee’s eyes, though, were still all for that building up on its spur of stone, leaning against the mountain behind it like someone very mindful of who might come up from behind his back. What few towers the Laurins’ House possessed had a grudging look to them, squared, blunted like the oldest of the older buildings below. Only one tower stood a little higher than the rest, sitting furthest back in the structure and built partially into the spur as the foundations of the building were. From it, a few cautious, narrow-eyed windows gazed down on the valley, giving an impression of thoughtful watchfulness, a regard that trusted no one and didn’t sleep. 
There’s a message there
, Lee  thought, 
if I could understand it…

She lost sight of the building at last as the craft came down on a paved area not far from the huge building with its arched porticoes. “The 
Miraha
 are in morning session there,” dil’Hemrev said. “You’ve been invited to the afternoon session, which is formal… so you’ll want to change. We’ll get you settled in the visitors’ quarters and send someone around for you when it’s time for the session. Then the reception with the 
Miraha
 will be this evening.”

“Is the Laurin likely to be in attendance?” Per said.

“I think not,” said dil’Hemrev. “He’s been traveling on business for the last few weeks; we would have been informed if he’d returned. He’ll be disappointed that he missed you, of course.”

“Of course,” Per said.

The craft put its ramp out, and they all trooped down after dil’Hemrev and followed her across the landing pad and down a paved pathway to a great door in the bottom of one of the nearest towers, a massive drum-shaped structure with several smaller towers incorporated inside its outer walls. Shortly thereafter, following a climb up several circles’ worth of stairs, Lee and Gelert were ushered into their rooms by a young Alfen woman in the livery of the 
Miraha
, and the massive steel-bound door closed behind them.

Neither of them could do much for the first few seconds except look around in astonishment. “It’s a whole floor,” Lee said, gazing around. From where they stood, a long straight stonewalled room at least fifty feet wide ran right across to the far side of the tower, and seemingly straight out onto an exterior balcony; there were no windows or doors there that Lee could see. Massive, dark wooden furniture, beautifully carved, stood here and there—tables, couches, almeries, and bookshelves ranged against the warm brown stone.