Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (41 page)

“Well?” she said again.

He had no answer for her; only, as he uncovered his eyes, a stricken, pleading look; a whole species looking through one entity’s eyes, beauty and immortality pleading just to be left the way they were, left alone. But that look wasn’t all Lee had to go on. Before he had covered his eyes, his will had looked out first.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Lee said, and closed her eyes to See better.

“What?”

The crashing noise came up from the gates again, a big ruinous sound: explosives, perhaps. Lee ignored it. Equally the cry of utter anguish that went up from just a few feet away was meant to distract her; she refused to let it do so. Lee looked at this man with all the concentration her training had taught her, looked at him as fiercely as she had looked at dil’Sorden’s dying soul or at any human being who’d ever stood in the dock before her. Under her gaze the Elf-King  writhed and cried out, at first just in his own pain, desperate against the beginning of a final fate more terrible than any mere sacrifice by death.
This was where we left off
, she thought. 
This is where it started: and now I finish it. Or it finishes
 
me.

The shouting got louder, started to turn into screaming. It wasn’t just the Elf-King’s pain, now, not just his fear or anguish, but that of all the others native to this world, shaped by it and by the needs they’d learned from it. Desperate, their universe was crying out to them in their own bodies and souls, warning them of the gift about to be withdrawn from them by the stranger, the attacking enemy. Once more they were being violated from outside their world:  once more the things that made them uniquely themselves were about to be stolen from them by the ephemerals. 
Look at them!
 the song warned. 
They are
 
deedless and cripple, their life is the length of a dream; how little and valueless a thing is that life,
 
laid by yours—ineffectual, small—

No!
 Lee cried inwardly, while in her the Sight fought with the writhing painful appearance that now began to flow over everything like early morning fog, twisting what it touched. It twisted the man who fell to his knees not far from her, hiding his face, his head in his arms, unable to bear what he was beginning to see. It twisted Gelert, so that he howled in pain and betrayal and crouched down among the cloudy dark shapes of the great rosebushes, in which the fire of the roses now began to be smothered in that writhing darkness like flame in the heart of smoke. And that darkness was reaching out to Lee now, smothering, furious, intent on killing her vision.

Sorry
, Lee said inside her. 
I answer to a higher authority. You
 
may be a universe, but that’s all you are; and the Worlds were made for us, not we for them!

The darkness flowed all around her, choking, strangling. But Lee turned her mind from it, refusing again to be distracted. There was other business. Nearby a man already kneeling had dropped to hands and knees, moaning in pain and fury, hands clenched full of dirt. Which one was the master now, him or his world, was in doubt, and in the balance. 
But the Balance is Hers
, Lee thought. 
And mine
—
!
She groped toward the Elf-King through the smoky uncertainty, reminding herself that this one was no different in its way than the uncertainties she dealt with every day at a crime scene. So often the irrationalities of the physical universe tried to blur the path to the truth, but they always failed if the practitioner remembered What she worked for, and kept her intention—

Lee’s surroundings, in contact with the heart of that crouching figure, were intent on her, too. The smoke started giving way to flame, slow-moving for the moment, but scorching. Soon the true brushfire would get loose, the illusion against which even Lee would have no defense for long. 
No use playing the extinguisher at the top of
 
the flame
, she thought; 
go low, go to the source, or nowhere!
 But she was going to have to do her work differently here. This world wasn’t the largely insensate kind of universe the other worlds had become, malleable in the physical sense but passive in the moral one. And it certainly wasn’t as horribly passive as the newfound world had become. 
Poor Terra!
 Lee thought, no matter how bizarre it might be to feel sorry for a whole world as if it was a drug addict or a kitten someone had tried to drown— something damaged from the start and doomed to a sorry fate unless someone took responsibility for being kind to it. 
If this is a trend, we
 
have to stop it from spreading. Because who’d want to live in a world like that?

A long red line of flame ran along quick as a fleeing rattler along the hillcrest above her. 
And since pity isn’t turning me from my intention,
Lee thought
, here comes his rage.
The flame started reaching down toward her from the crest of the hill like clawing fingers, full of the Elf-King’s buried fury, which had always known this day would come.

The fire sped up, the fingers of flame running together into a single wall that came plunging down the hillside, rockslide-swift.  Lee watched it come, and Saw it to be unreal—the world’s fear speaking to her through the Elf-King’s power.
But he showed me what to do about this,
she thought, and stood her ground, gazing up into the fire and imposing her will upon it. It splashed away to either side of her, as the rocks had fallen away from the Elf-King when Dierrich tried to call the mountain down on top of him. Here, through Laurin, she had access to the same power he had been using, the same certainty of mastery—and  more than that because the roses were here, the fire of his irrational and unconditional love for them burning fierce in them. 
A lot of power available
, Lee thought, as she started to feel the earth rumble under her feet.
Huge amounts. But still not quite enough—

The world around her was becoming really frightened. The shaking under her feet got worse, and a harsh sharp clattering noise from above now heralded the first stones starting to fall down the hill—the world using the oldest weapon the Ellay basin afforded it. What mastery Lee was acquiring second-hand from the Elf-King wasn’t going to be sufficient to keep them all from being killed before what needed to happen had a chance. 
I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to do this,
Lee thought, trembling with terror.
Not here at the heart of things, where anything could happen.
But there’s no choice now, can’t wait any more, the stakes are too high—

Lee gulped, braced herself, and then laid herself fully open inside, not to Alfheim, but to the only thing she was sure was stronger—and that she feared more. “Justice here present,” she cried, “be in me now, see the truth I See, and
make Truth manifest!”

And without hesitation, swift and terrible, far more powerful here at the center of things than in the outer universes, unmitigated, She came—not merely personified, and to Lee’s astonishment, not alone. Lee struggled to hold herself upright in the blast and whirl of light and imagery that descended on her, surrounding her with an air that sliced her from inside like swords when she breathed it in. Something more central than mere Justice or mere Death informed it, a Power senior to both and somehow unifying them—ready to bring its invincibility out of theory and into the physical sphere, if someone would show it the way. That awful conjunct Power looked at the Elf-King through Lee, and waited.

In this moment, symbol was everything. With the earth shaking under her and the wind screaming around her, Lee reached out shaking for one of the roses, broke it off its bush, clenched her fist hard on its thorns, and then upended it and squeezed until the white of its light was stained red with her blood.

Give him the gift he seeks!

And the Power descended in turn on him, and did her bidding.

Because of her Sight, Lee saw what was happening to him, in that first instant, as
he
did: a view imbued with both frightful intimacy and an awful passionless detail, a point of view like a god’s. Understanding what was happening to him, if Lee had then had any power of speech left to her, she would willingly have cried in anguish, with her own world’s MacIlwain, “I am become the Lady, the Creator of worlds…!” But she had no power left to do anything but crouch down against the shaking world, wondering in terror
what have I turned loose!
 —as after a few breaths’ time of terror and pain, a vast darkness began rearing up above her, wavering in and out of shape, perhaps a man, perhaps not. Even in the face of this utter chaos Lee found herself thinking again of that commcall long ago—that moment echoing this one in essence if not in reality. 
And what about the roses?
 the voice had asked, holding itself steady because of its own fear of this moment, its terror at becoming the shadow that might well someday drown everything in the final blackness and cold—

But the fire of the roses was still around them, and would not be drowned. Or rather, the darkness knew and loved them too well to allow it. Beyond the roses on every side the tattering void was rushing in, a whirling vortex of form dissolving in formlessness, a hurricane’s eye of abnegation with that darkness towering up higher and higher at its heart. The dark was struggling with the torrent, thrusting outward against it and into it, a sword-edge of power cleaving through. There was still something of human form about the one wielding the sword of will, though how long he could keep a grip on that humanity, or what would happen if he lost it, Lee had no idea. Eleven worlds’ worth of force were battering like a screaming wind at the shape and the will now reaching inescapably inward to grapple with the heart of hearts of the worlds. Alfheim’s core shrieked like a world dying as he gripped it, thrashed and tried to tear itself to shreds in rejection of the traitor Elf who had just willingly made Death part of him. But in his own way, he 
was
 Alfheim’s core, sensate as the world was not. It had always been subject to him. Now, scream though it might, blacken its sun and kill its stars though it might, he was its ruler still. Lee could feel his terrible resolve gaining ground, unrelenting, unremitting, as he reached in and in to the power that even before he had possessed only in shadow, etiolated and incomplete. Now he was complete; everything else would follow.

… if he could only hang on! For the desperate world kept fighting. Lee, staring into the chaos tumbling around them, could See—or hear, she hardly knew which—the anguished, wretched scream of Alfheim itself as it found voice. 
I kept you immortal, I kept you beautiful, it would have lasted forever, why are you
 
throwing it away?!
 She covered her eyes, weeping for the world’s pain; but that still couldn’t stop the Sight.

Because it was never meant to stay that way
, his answer came, as he kept groping toward the the heart of the violent maelstrom, feeling for the very center, which was his very center as well. 
Because this
 
should have happened a long time ago, if something hadn’t gone wrong, if the pain of the rotation
 
hadn’t made the world feel it was destroying itself. Because if it doesn’t happen now,
 everything 
begins to die a death beyond anything mere entropy would have had in store. Because—

—and he found and grasped the final core, the heart of the sheaf of worlds.

Lee felt him find it. Even through the paroxysm of despair and rage and terror that Alfheim was suffering, nothing could have kept her from feeling it. As his hand closed around the inmost heart of his world, Lee felt it also close around hers; and along with Alfheim, and all the other worlds, and all the other lives in all the worlds, she bent double and clutched herself and screamed 
No!

But yes
, he said. 
At last, yes!

And then he tore the core of the sheaf apart.

At least that was what it felt like. The pain was unbearable, so awful that the Worlds stopped screaming, and a silence of utter torment fell such as had not been heard for aeons. But Lee, transfixed by the agony equally with all the rest of creation, at least had some inkling of what was happening; and the pain didn’t blind her. Indeed, she wondered if anything would ever be able to blind her after what she Saw now, what she could not in any way have prevented herself from Seeing.

It seemed to him as if he was working with his hands, and therefore Lee Saw it so—though what forces he was applying to the great blazing core of light he held, she couldn’t imagine. All eleven universes’ energy, all eleven universes’ matter, all grasped in one mind and confined in one place, was a concept incomprehensible enough to her. She understood even less why, as he concentrated his will upon it, the sheaf of worlds should lose that appearance of a billion billion suns crushed together, and suddenly become transparent, hardly there, a bubble iridescent not with light but with probability.

Until the bubble multiplied itself outward, and became again not just one but eleven, commingling and  interpenetrating, all their surfaces swirling with urgent brilliance…

… and in a vast and deafening tumult that would have been a cry equally of terror and deliverance, each of those eleven became eleven more, and their surfaces swirled in turn, power ready to be unleashed—

Yes
, he said. 
Be.

In a silent roar of light, they burst into darkness, and Lee, and everything else, went with them.

But still she was not blind: still she Saw. She saw the new outrush of stars in the worlds just made, matter and energy locked again in their old embrace of fire. But much more of Lee’s  attention was for the old worlds, the ones that had been created by the first rotation of the sheaf’s core. Theoretically she was still on a planet inside one of them. 
Yes, well, theoretically…
 Lee thought; for though she could see a hundred other universes’ events beginning to unfold, she had no idea where she was, or whether she still even had a body to be anywhere in. Stars in plenty she could see around her, but she couldn’t see anything of herself.