Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (27 page)

There we’re in agreement. I just wish I knew what. This protection thing… I can’t tell whether
 
she’s for or against the idea of someone sneaking up on us some night and putting a knife in me. But she seems eager not to have LAPD blame the Alfen for it.

Well, we’ll find out
, Gelert said. 
Especially since an acreage like this is going to be difficult to
 
secure at night. And our magic balcony door there… is it any better at keeping people out than it
 
is at keeping us in?

Another happy thought
, Lee said. 
Thank you so much.

Gelert looked at Lee with some amusement as she slipped the dress on over her head. “You missed some fur on the back…”

Lee groaned and slipped it off again. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

“You’ve got hours yet to get it clean,” Gelert said. Then, naturally, came the knock on the door. “Oops, I tell a lie.”

“They keep doing that!” Lee muttered. “Are all their clocks running fast? I haven’t finished my makeup yet!”

She dashed into her own bathroom. 
Though I don’t know why I bother
, she thought, dealing with her makeup at the highest speed consonant with keeping it in the right places on her face. 
The way all of
 
them look, I could go in and have everything about me redone but my sensibilities, and it still
 
wouldn’t matter in the slightest; by comparison, I’d still look like an unmade bed.
 She sighed. 
Still,
 
you have to let people see that you’re trying…

Five minutes or so later Lee was in order, and she and Gelert met their escort at the door again. When they got downstairs to the entrance of the residence tower, this time there were no women with torches, but just Isif dil’Hemrev again, much more formally dressed than they’d seen her so far, in a long deep-cut gown of a truly striking blue that exactly caught both the color of her eyes and of the sapphires wound into her hair.

Chatting casually with Per and the others, dil’Hemrev led them about a five minutes’ walk from the residence tower to a smaller building that stood in the shadow of the 
Miraha
‘s great hall. “The Laurin’s banqueting hall,” dil’Hemrev said, and stood aside to let the committee members walk in past her through great bronze doors laid open.

They came into a space far more humane and intimate than the 
Miraha
‘s hall, though this one wasn’t precisely small either. It was a long room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling some thirty meters high, all painted with the clouds of a sky at sunset. Tall windows ran down either side of the room, letting in the afternoon light, and a single great table ran right down the room’s length, big enough to seat at least a hundred for a formal banquet. It was set as a buffet, though, and positively groaned with food and drink. At the sight of it, Gelert’s stomach made an alarming noise.

Lee couldn’t help but smile slightly. “I thought you just ate,” she said.

“My stomach is having second thoughts,” Gelert said. “Look at that salmon!”

There were already perhaps fifty Alfen in the room, but for the moment they were all hanging back as if waiting for something. Lee found out what when, from behind them, someone came whose approach made the small crowd part to right and left. Through the space they made came a small Alfen woman, silver-haired, slight-boned and delicate—something of a surprise at first glance, for Lee had gotten used to Alfen being on the tall side.

Whatever quiet small talk had been going on among the Alfen until now ceased completely. “Our guests,” the woman said, “I welcome you to Alfheim, and to Aien Mhariseth, the Laurin’s city. My name is Dierrich dil’Estenv. I am the
mrinLauvrin,
the Laurin’s chief deputy; some people might call me the Elf-King’s grand vizier.”

There were some chuckles about that. “The Laurin is not presently in residence,” dil’Estenv said, “being abroad on business; but I’m glad to do service for him in his place. I welcome you all to our hearth; may your own service to your own peoples prosper!”

The committee applauded her politely enough, and Per then made, apparently extemporaneously, a very gracious thank-you speech that confirmed to Lee why he’d been sent along on this mission—not just as a former law inducement officer and a present-day politician, but one of those who makes the work of diplomacy look easy even at uncomfortable times. At the end of it, dil’Estenv took Per’s hand, much to his surprise, and bowed over it; then led him up to the nearest table, poured them both a glass of white wine out of a glass ewer that stood there, and pledged him. They both drank.

This seemed to be a signal for the Alfen equivalent of the catering staff to start making their rounds, and the Alfen who had been invited, members of the 
Miraha
 and of other government agencies, began to mingle. Shortly Lee found herself standing with a cup of wine in one hand and the third or fourth of several choice finger-food dainties in the other, talking art history to a red-haired Alfen “senator” who had commented in passing on the carved design of the cup.

Lee was rather astonished at how different the tone of the proceedings was from the session in the 
Miraha. It’s almost as if someone told them to cut it out…
 And she was even more astonished when, as she and the senator, Lasme, had just gotten into some of the juicier details about recent discoveries in Earth pre-Columbian art, she saw someone come up beside her, turned to see who it was, and saw dil’Estenv there.

“Don’t stop for me!” the
mrinLauvrin
said, amused; and Lasme laughed and went on about the differences between Aztec and Huichtilopochtlin terracotta for some minutes more, before realizing that his glass was empty and going to get a refill.

“I had no idea you were interested in art history, madam,” Lee said.

“Art, perhaps less,” dil’Estenv said. “History… rather more.” She looked at Lee with an expression that had some regret in it. “We’ve been dealing with the fruits of that for some days, now, in ways that none of us might have expected even a few months ago. Our history with humans, with others…” That regret gathered to itself just an edge of a smile. “But maybe it’s been delayed too long.”

“To do something about that history now,” Lee said, “especially about the histories of the Alfen who’ve been murdered in the past few years, too many of them… that’s what matters now, madam.”

“Dierrich, please,” dil’Estenv said. “No one uses titles or housenames over wine. In that house over there”—she gestured with her head toward the 
Miraha
— “—things may be different.”

“They certainly felt that way today,” Gelert said.

Dil’Estenv shook her head slightly. “Alfen can be very conservative,” she said softly, “and for those of us who’re a little less so—like my master—that place can be a difficult one to work. But one has to take it at its own value, and work through channels, slowly. When you live as long as my people do, there’s no use getting the lawmakers angry; they stay that way for such a very long time…”

Her look was wry. Lee couldn’t help but smile. “As for your specific investigation,” dil’Estenv said, “my master has expressly required that you be given whatever you ask for in terms of data regarding outworld homicides. All of that would normally be held by the Bureau of External Affairs, which, as you might imagine, is most eager to keep the information right where it is. But they must obey the Laurin no less than I… so if they give you any trouble, let me know.”

“And has there been trouble, madam—” Gelert said, and then, noting her expression, jocularly warning. “Dierrich?”

Dierrich allowed herself only the slightest smile. “When has an intelligence organization ever wholeheartedly cooperated with orders to give up its hard-won data?” she said. “Oh, there’ve been some small ructions, disagreements over protocol and precedence…but nothing that should now interfere with your work. If there is any further interference, contact my office. Our interest is in having your work here go smoothly and with speed.”

They talked for a little while more before Dierrich moved on, making her rounds of the committee. Lee found herself impressed by the woman. She was no less beautiful than any of the rest of the Alfen, but in her case that beauty was tempered by something else—a sense of mind, of thoughtfulness, and of power contained; and small as she was, the way she bore herself made her seem taller than those around her. Lee was reminded strongly of what she had almost Seen in the Elf-King, that night in the restaurant, and found herself suddenly able to understand why this woman would have risen to the post of his second-in-command. There was a kinship of their styles of power; a weapon, but one kept in reserve.

Lee looked after her when she finally moved off to go talk to Mellie Hopkins and a couple of the others. “A very nice lady,” Gelert said. 
Unusually so for an Alfen.

That’s not what I’m thinking about at the moment
, Lee said. 
That woman’s the local equivalent of
 
the Young Emperor of the Xainese, or the UN SecGen. I wonder where
 her 
security is?

Where it doesn’t show, most likely. Even our own people know how to be discreet at events like
 
this.

Lee nodded. 
I suppose,
she said. 
It’s just that our blue-eyed dil’Hemrev and her ‘concerns’ about
 
my safety are still on my mind. Just because ExAff seems to have had its wrist slapped doesn’t
 
relieve me entirely. And when we get up into the ‘rose garden’ tomorrow, or whenever… that
 
concerns me a little, too.

Well, we’ll be together
, Gelert said. 
For the garden, anyway. For the data, you don’t need me; you
 
can savage ExAff yourself, after what Madam Dierrich there says. And
, he said, grinning, as he turned away toward the buffet table, 
you can find out whether she’s really to be trusted…

*10*

The next morning, after breakfast, the committee met informally for an hour or so to coordinate details about who they would be meeting for the next couple of days, and to discuss their findings so far. The scheduling part of the meeting went well enough, but as for the rest of it, Lee thought to herself as she and the others prepared to leave that she had never heard so much doubletalk and obfuscation in one place in her life. Everyone on the committee was certain that they were being even more closely watched and listened to than they had been in Ys, and everyone was intent on giving absolutely nothing away to the listeners. As she got up, Lee hoped it was as frustrating for them as it was for her.

Gelert was shouldering into his doggie pack as Lee glanced over at him. “So you finally get to do the Homicide end of things,” he said. “I envy you, but I’m still stuck with the numbers team…”

Don’t envy me too quickly
, Lee said. 
It remains to be seen if ExAff is going to be as cooperative as
 
dil’Estenv thinks they are.

Gelert grinned. 
Should be interesting.

“Don’t worry,” Lee said. “I’ll be recording everything for analysis; you’ll have plenty of time to look it all over later.”

“Right. See you for lunch?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you have the commcode of the offices they’ve assigned us over at the Exchequer; call me there if you need a break.”

“Right.”

ExAff’s buildings turned out to be unusually beautiful ones, built more or less in the shadow of the Laurins’ House, at the edge of the city closest to the bottom of the rising ground that led up to the cliffs. That whole area had been turned into a sort of vast, naturalized rockery, planted with rhododendron, hardy alpines, and other trees and plants native to the area. The effect produced was of a natural landscape that had laid itself out in an unusually ordered manner, masses and colors balanced, but not so balanced or arranged that an observer immediately assumed the hand of man rather than nature. Against this varied tapestry, the ExAff buildings reared up, a set of six smaller towers connected by a low wall, containing a formal garden surrounding a central plaza, and in the middle of the plaza, one sharp short tower, almost pyramidal, like the point of a spear thrusting up out of the green grass.

In one of the smaller towers, Lee was not surprised at all to be met by Isif dil’Hemrev, back in uniform again and sporting an attitude that, even for an Alfen, Lee could only characterize as chastened. Dil’Hemrev greeted her most cordially, led Lee to a large airy office with a view down onto the central plaza, furnished with a commwall three times the size of Lee’s own and a state-of-the-art WilNo data retrieval and storage system. “Obedient to the
mrinLauvrin
’s desires,” dil’Hemrev said— 
and was that
 
the slightest hint of gritted teeth?
 Lee wondered, “we’ve given you our entire ‘untoward mortality’ database. If you have any questions about how the data’s been sorted, or you have any desire to look at physical evidence supporting the individual cases, you have only to ask for me or for my assistant, Weilin; you can comm her, or her office is that third one down the corridor. She’ll be holding herself ready for you all today should you need her.”

“Thank you,” Lee said. “I appreciate it very much.” Dil’Hemrev went off, and for a moment or so Lee just stood there in the middle of the room, looking at the commwall and savoring the moment. She actually grinned. 
About this, at least, Matt was right
, she thought. 
This was worth coming for.
 She sat down at the desk, where even the chair was comfortable, and got to work.

*

Two hours or so later, though, Lee wasn’t so happy anymore, and by lunchtime, she was less happy still.

The database the Alfen had assembled for her contained literally hundreds of cases, dating back some twenty years—a huge mass of data Lee spent the initial hour or so sorting in various ways to examine the cases for any correlations that would spring out quickly. The problem, as she discovered fairly quickly, was that the forensics in all these cases were “dry”; they came without any analysis of the events, at least none that Lee could find. At first she thought perhaps this was simply because she hadn’t dug deep enough, or had scanned the data using insufficiently specific concepts or keywords. But as hour added itself to hour, it became plain to Lee that if analysis had been done at all, it hadn’t been included in the material she’d been given. What she had here was the equivalent of about twenty years’ worth of “cold cases,” some of them right down in the bottom of the deep freeze, as coldness went. And while the forensic data seemed complete enough on the surface, if Lee or anyone else had wanted to actually go to any of the scenes and look for further data, so much time had passed on nearly all of them that there was now next to no hope of finding anything else useful, no matter how skillful the physical or psychoforensicist might be.

So they’ve left me with a huge mass of information, but no conclusions drawn about it by their
 
own people,
Lee thought.
And the majority of the cases otherwise so old that, though
 
bureaucratically they’re ‘cold,’ the reality of it is that they’re closed without resolution or even
 
final assessment. This does not exactly strike me as ‘cooperation.’
 She leaned back in her chair and looked at the big commwall, on which the list of pertinent files, hundreds of them, stared back at her.

Unless I’m coming at this from the wrong direction and missing some kind of cultural difference
 
that’s obvious to them and not to me. After all, why would Alfen necessarily perceive the crime
 
the same way we do? And we’re not always perfect in the way we classify murder, either.
 She thought briefly of one police force in a neighboring state, some years back, which without a second thought had for many years classified people murdered in its jurisdiction as “male victim,” “female victim,” and “prostitute.” 
Is it possible that Alfen who’re murdered become ‘nonpeople’ in some
 
way? Or am I just giving them too much benefit of the doubt, and is this just straightforward
 
obfuscation?

She made a wry face. 
Too soon to tell. Let’s break for lunch.

Lee spent a little while working out how to direct the local computer system to dump all the murder files to her pad; and while it was doing that, said to the commwall, “Call Gelert reh’Mechren, please; a temporary code at the Exchequer.”

A few seconds later Gelert glanced up at her from a low table where his own pad and some printouts and other documentation were lying. “Thought I might hear from you around now,” he said. “The tourist board left a message with me for you.”

“The tourist board?” Lee said. “They actually 
have
 one? Must be the quietest office in town.”

Gelert grinned, an expression that suggested he shared her opinion, but wasn’t going to say so in the clear. “Tomorrow afternoon, if the weather’s good, they’ll send someone around to show us the way up to the ‘Rose Garden.’ Seems there are some nice rock formations up there. Did you bring hiking shoes?”

“I’ve got some cross trainers that’ll do all right.”

“Fine. The guy will stop by the residence tower at fourteen or so. Ready for lunch now?”

“Extremely. I’ll see you back there shortly.”

The wall flicked back to the file view. Lee killed her pad’s connection to it, packed it up, and spent a few moments looking, not at the commwall, but at the view of the mountain wall behind the building. She’d spent the whole morning with her back turned to it on purpose, for even viewed sidelong, the rugged splendor of it drew her to spend minutes on end gazing at it. It was as if it had a message for her, one it was being prevented from communicating. Now, just for a few minutes, she bent her attention on the mountain and called for the Sight.

It wouldn’t come.

Lee nodded, just slightly. Something was specifically blocking her. 
All right
, she thought as she got up and headed for the door. 
Fine. We’ll see what happens tomorrow…

She spent the rest of that afternoon, and all the morning of the next day, right through noontime, sifting through the Alfen homicidal mortality data for any sign that she was missing something obvious. If she was going to go knocking on Dierrich dil’Estenv’s door with accusations of continued noncooperation by ExAff, she wanted to be very sure she was in the right before she did it. But all her work left her exactly where she’d been the previous day—still lacking any trace in the record of any local analysis of the murders. 
It’s as if they wanted to ignore them
, she thought, pushing back from her desk around thirteen. 
Is the very concept that an Elf
can
be murdered somehow embarrassing to them, I
 
wonder? If it is, maybe dil’Estenv can suggest another tack I might take to get what I need.

She headed back to the residence tower under a perfectly cloudless sky. The weather here seemed to get settled, the way it did at home in LA, and stay fair and surprisingly warm for prolonged periods in the summer; the way it had been behaving, it was hard to believe that this was still an alpine landscape, and would be deep in snow come January, 
But I have a feeling we’re unlikely to see ski season here
, she thought as she climbed the tower stairs toward her and Gelert’s room. 
Or the far side of next week,
 
for that matter.
 She’d managed a few quiet words with Sal in the midst of the clatter and stir of the group’s buffet breakfast that morning—just long enough for him to tell her what she’d been afraid of:

“Their new books are. clean, Lee. We’re going to have to go home empty handed, unless…”

Unless.
 She went in and had a quick lunch with Gelert, and it was just as well it was quick, for she’d hardly had time to change and finish the hasty sandwich she’d thrown together at the sideboard before someone knocked at the door. Gelert went to speak it open.

There stood a tall, fair, freckled, somewhat sunburnt Alfen in casual climbing clothes, shorts, and a short-sleeved tunic and jacket, and high socks and climbing boots. He looked like any weekend hiker—except that the weekend hikers with whom Lee was acquainted rarely looked so much as if Michelangelo had carved them. “I’m Earmen dil’Undevhain,” the Alfen said. “I am told you are interested in climbing up to Istelin’ru Semivh this afternoon?”

He doesn’t even have knobby knees.
 Lee thought. 
It’s just not fair.
 “That’s right,” Lee said.

“We should get started, then,” dil’Undevhain said. “It is somewhat late already; but we have just enough time to get up there and back before dark.”

“Two minutes,” Lee said, and went to get her jacket. 
Interesting
, she said privately to Gelert. 
This is
 
the first Alfen I’ve heard since we got here, except in the
 Miraha 
, who
 isn’t 
perfectly fluent in
 
English. Can it be that for a change we’re meeting someone who isn’t associated with one of the
 
Alfen security services…?

It’d make an interesting change
, Gelert said. 
Meanwhile at least we get a nice afternoon out in the
 
air. But Lee—

Hmm?

Stay away from the edges of cliffs. You never can tell…

*

The walk up to Istelin’ru Semivh—if it could be called that, when it was eighty percent a climb up a thirty-percent incline—took nearly two hours. Dil’Undevhain was a pleasant enough guide, talking with apparent enjoyment about the terrain, the plant and animal life, and the views. But he set a pace that Lee had some trouble matching, even though she often enough went hiking in the Angeles National Forest in her spare time. 
Damned if I’m going to let him see that I’m having trouble, though!

Their path took them eastward around the foot of the mountain wall that loomed behind Aien Mhariseth, over a small rubble-strewn yoke between it and a lesser peak farther east, then diagonally up the mountain’s southern face. “Not a tall mountain,” dil’Undevhain said; “only eight hundred meters. But the view near the summit is quite wonderful.”

It had better be
, Gelert said silently. 
My paws are going to be in shreds after this.
 Lee felt for him, for the scree that had tumbled down the mountain to define most of the paths they used when not climbing on or over raw rock was all that harsh dolomite limestone, white or pale gray, sharp-edged, and abrasive as sandpaper. The path wound back and forth across the mountain’s south face a few times, sheltered from the sheer drop by huge scatters of boulders or upstanding incompletely eroded piers of limestone, like stalagmites. There was little to see here but pale, shattered stone, in chunks of every size, and occasional gnarled, stunted arolla pines or small patches of the local alpines, mostly in flower at this season. Over everything, the steepled towers of the mountain reared up, hard and white against the afternoon blue, the forced perspective of the view from the path making them look even more forbidding than they were to start with.

There was one last switchback where the path gained nearly twenty meters in a final steep climb. Lee had to go from handhold to handhold up it, and was privately surprised that no one had sunk in pitons or a helping rail in such a difficult spot. 
But maybe Alfen have rules against it or something if this is a
 
conservation area
, she thought, going up the last couple of meters as fast as she could, to avoid slipping down out of control. She came out on top gasping a little, despite her best intentions. Dil’Undevhain stood waiting there, seemingly without a hair on him mussed and not even slightly out of breath.