Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy and Other Stories (19 page)

Looking uncharacteristically nervous, the elf lord climbed the stairs to the stage, gripped the hilt, and placed a booted foot upon the body of the Ulfin. With difficulty he wrested the blade from the corpse.

Everyone, including the jaded elves at their table, gasped. For the sword was moving, twitching and undulating like an arthritic serpent. To Marcus’s horror, it suddenly screamed like damned souls were supposed to scream, and the appalling cry was in the voice of the dead Ulfin.

“Enough,” declared the High King.

The runes on the blade suddenly flared bright red, the sword stiffened to its previous form, and the scream instantly stopped, much to everyone’s relief.

The king held the blade aloft. “I give you Wolfslayer Ulfinsbane!”

Cassius Claudo rose to his feet, his face looking paler and more pinched than it ever had before throughout the course of the journey. “If you will excuse us, High King, we are exhausted. I thank you for the meal, and beg your leave to excuse me and my men from further festivities this evening. We are tired from our long ride up your mountain.”

“You have it,” Mael said, sounding disappointed, “although I demand your presence in my court on the morrow.”

“Have you not already made too many demands on Amorr, your Majesty?” Claudo said.

“Your conceit is considerable, human. Perhaps you forget—no, it is more likely you are ignorant of the fact—that my grandfather was ruling these very halls when your forefathers were roaming naked through the forests like animals.”

“The angels too preceded the creation of man. And yet, as Paulus writes, ‘Do you not know that you will judge the angels?’”

“Elfdom fears neither man nor angel. Nor judgment.”

“Nor God?”

Marcus had risen to his feet, as had the entire embassy. But now they paused as the bishop and High King engaged in verbal battle.

The High King smiled coldly. “There are no gods, human, not in the sense you mean. There are only the higher Forms, of which we elves are the most perfect expressions on this particular plane. Of that which is good—beauty, time, wisdom, and talent—you must admit that we enjoy the greater portion. Clearly we most closely approach the ideal.”

“If you insist on imagining that there is a God, my lord bishop, a singular and rational divine being who served out those portions with intent and purpose, why, then you and I must both be a part of Him. Only two of a thousand thousand thousand insignificant elements that, en masse, comprise the whole. But the notion of a single god is not only baseless, it is meaningless, immaterial. You worship a metaphor.”

Claudo squared his shoulders toward the king. “We worship a God who became man. There is nothing less immaterial than that.”

“You put much faith in an old text, human. If you value ancient writings so, I shall show you our library. We elves possess many such texts, some written by elf, some by man, some through demons, and some from gods. All of them are far older than those scribblings that give meaning to your fantasies and your dark dreams of slaughter.”

The two stood locked in a deadly stare, seeming like titans of legend at war in the nether world.

Finally, the High King shrugged. “But it is late, and the entertainment planned is unlikely to be to your taste. So you have our leave to depart.”

Marcus murmured some meaningless civilities to the elves at his table and turned to leave. But when he went to follow Lodi and the others, a hand caught his sleeve. He turned and was surprised to see the pretty elvith standing next to him … and that she was eye to eye with him.

They were green, he was surprised to see. He quite liked green eyes, especially when set nicely in such a lovely face.

“Are you the Valerian?” she demanded, her accent slurring the words slightly.

“You’re not that tall for an elf,” he blurted out, not knowing what to say in his confusion.

“Well, you’re not that old for a man-priest,” she retorted. “Are you the Valerian?”

“Yes, I’m called Marcus Valerius, son of Corvus. How are you called?”

“There’s no time. Listen to me. Your life is in danger. You must not go to your chambers. As soon as you walk out of the building, jump up behind the statue on the steps, to the right. Wait for me there, and try not to move too much. I will see that no one notices you. And tell no one!”

“My life is in danger?” Marcus asked, alarmed, but already she had slipped away into the crowd of mingling elves and men moving toward the doors. In danger from whom?

Lodi, noticing that he hadn’t followed them, had come back for him. “Are you coming?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Go on. I was just curious about something.”

Lodi looked at him askance. “Are you feeling well? You look unsettled.”

Marcus attempted a weak smile, but even he knew it was unconvincing. “I don’t think the spice they used on the pork is sitting quite right with me. Let’s go. I’ll be right behind you.”

Marcus yearned to find out what Lodi would think about the strange elf girl’s warning. But she had said to tell no one, not to tell no one except his dwarven bodyguard, so he held his tongue. Was it a trap? No, that made no sense. If the elves had wanted him dead, he’d already be dead. They were in Elebrion, after all, and they could have simply poisoned his wine. The elf king certainly hadn’t been shy about killing that Ulfin in front of everyone, and Marcus found it hard to imagine that he’d fear to do the same even to Cassius Claudo, let alone one of his lesser companions, if he felt the need.

He thought about Magnus’s warning the morning of their departure. Was it possible that the magnates of Amorr who hoped for war had planted an assassin within the embassy? That was hard to believe. He’d gotten to know many of the men in the embassy over the last month, and while he didn’t necessarily like all of them, he found it impossible to imagine any of them being willing to murder him.

He smiled ruefully. If it was so easy for a man to pick out another man willing to kill him, no king would have ever been murdered by his successor. When money and power were at stake, no man’s life could be deemed entirely safe, not even his own. He came to his decision just as he walked through the door, only a step or two behind Lodi.

Glancing to his right, he saw the statue: a tall martial-looking elf holding a scroll and gesturing with his other hand. Feigning a cough, he doubled over and lurched to the right, pretending that he’d stumbled over his own feet. Seeing that Lodi and the priest who’d been right behind him weren’t looking back, he took four quick steps and leaped up behind the statue, doing his best to press into the shadows it cast in the torchlight.

The moon was three-quarters full and reflected brightly off the stone steps and the building façade. But the statue was thick enough to block the view of anyone looking back from the lower steps, and one would have to turn one’s head at nearly a ninety-degree angle immediately upon exiting the building to have any view of him at all.

It wasn’t long before Cassius Claudo and Captain Hezekius strolled down the steps, flanked by four Michaelines and an honor guard of eight elves. The doors closed behind them, and the sound of their steps gradually died away.

Marcus found himself alone in the silent shadows. He began to feel very silly, crouching behind the tall statue, hiding from absolutely nothing. His legs were beginning to cramp, so he sat down and made himself as comfortable as he could on its broad stone base.

He amused himself by imagining who the hypothetical assassin might be. Perhaps Magnus had hired Lodi specifically in order to kill him. Except that Magnus couldn’t have known which gladiator he and Sextus would choose. Zephanus had certainly made a fair attempt at talking him to death throughout their long ride. But it had been Barat, his own horse, that had done the only actual harm to him. He was surprised to realize that it wasn’t hard to imagine Cassius Claudo ordering a murder. But it was impossible to think of the bishop taking orders from a merchant or caring about war profits. Father Aestus? No, if only because killing Marcus would rob him of a future interlocutor.

“Valerian,” a female voice called softly.

Marcus jumped up, nearly hitting his head on the elf statue’s protruding scabbard. He had the sense of something large nearby, but he couldn’t see anything in the darkness. “Where are you? What’s happening?”

“Take two steps back from the statue and relax. Don’t move too much. You’ll be perfectly safe, just don’t struggle or make any noise.”

What? Marcus obediently took two steps backward, but instead of holding still, turned around in a circle toward the voice. He didn’t see anything, but there came a strange rushing sound as if a great wind had blown up. And then something impossibly big and strong grabbed him tightly around his arms and torso, and the ground began to rapidly fall away from him. He was suddenly above the rooftops of the palace, and he saw the moonlit mountains beyond.

He tried to scream, but the crushing force of the thing holding him had momentarily stolen his breath from him. He started to struggle, and then thought better of it when he looked at the stone streets of Elebrion flashing by beneath him. Relax, she’d said. He tried, but it was hard when the cold wind was making his eyes tear up.

The combination of the bright moon and the light from a great torch burning atop a watchtower they passed over gave him enough light to see what held him. He looked down at his chest and saw that he was being held in a pair of giant bird’s claws.

Warhawk. Which meant that the elf girl was a sorceress, and probably a militarily trained one at that. He had no idea what an elven sorceress would want with him or why she’d want to save his life—unless that was a trick too—but he was quite sure that if they didn’t get where they were going soon, he was going to freeze to death.

Then the words of his father that he’d thought he’d never need occurred to him. “Son, there are times when a battle isn’t going well and you begin to think it will be your last. In those times, a man has two choices: curse God or praise Him. It’s in those times that a man discovers who he is.”

Marcus had no trouble thinking of a few choice curses at the moment, future bishop or not. He was pretty sure he would have used them all if he’d been able to get any words. Instead, as the icy winds tore cruelly at him, he found himself laughing. Laughing at the bizarre nature of his predicament and in the amusing irony of the words of the Psalmist raining down on the night-shrouded mountains.

“
Confitebor Domino secundum iustitiam eius et psallam nomini Domini altissimi!
”

I will give thanks to the Lord because of His righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High.

Ad primum dicendum quod corpus non est de essentia animae, sed anima ex natura suae essentiae habet quod sit corpori unibilis. Unde nec proprie anima est in specie; sed compositum. Dicere animam esse de substantia Dei, manifestam improbabilitatem continet. Ut anima humana estquandoque intelligens in potentia, et scientiam quodammodo a rebus acquirit, et habet diversas potentias, quae omnia aliena sunt a Dei natura. Unde manifeste falsum est animam esse de substantia Dei. Ergo aelvi habent animae naturaliter unita.

THE GREAT BIRD finally released him from its claws onto a large projection jutting out from a mountainside. Marcus crumpled to the hard ground upon which it had deposited him.

He closed his eyes and, despite his uncontrollable shivering, decided that nothing had ever felt better than the solid feeling of terra firma supporting his weight. Elves could rule the sky, because man was assuredly not meant to fly!

“Are you well?” asked the elf girl. She stood beside him on the cliffside terrace. A small hut nestled against the mountain cliff behind her.

“I d-d-don’t know if I e-e-even know h-how to start answering that question.”

“So, you’re fine,” she replied, sounding amused. “I’m sorry to have surprised you that way, but there was no other way to make sure that no one would loose a shaft at you or stab you in the shadows as you were walking with the others. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen tonight.”

He looked up at her, still astonished by how pretty she was, despite the fact that she was almost surely insane, at least by human standards. And, in light of what he thought she was saying, quite possibly by elven standards too. She did, however, have the sense to be wearing a heavy fur-and-leather coat over the black dress she’d worn at the High King’s feast—a coat that he could have very much used at the moment.

“Why are you so c-convinced that someone w-wants to kill me? And what sort of m-m-magic can tell you what is going to happen before time?”

“Wait here,” she told him, and walked quickly toward a light that was flickering nearby.

Wait here? Marcus stared at her departing figure in disbelief, then rolled over onto his back and looked up at the warhawk looming over him.

It was nearly close enough for him to reach out and touch it. Or, more to the point, it was quite close enough to lurch forward and snap at him with its cruel and alarmingly powerful-looking beak. Its huge yellow eyes were larger than the golden plates upon which Marcus’s dinner had been served, and they were regarding him with what he hoped was more curiosity than malice. He looked at the claws in which he’d so recently been held, and he shuddered. The bird could have easily ripped him to shreds if it had been so minded.

“Oh, Vengirasse won’t harm you,” the elf girl said when she finally returned. It had only been a short while, but in the freezing night, lying on a rock in front of a giant bird of war, it had seemed like a lot longer. She draped a thick blanket over him. “That should warm you up a little. He’s very intelligent. Well, he knows the difference between portage and prey, anyway.”

Marcus wrapped the blanket tightly around him. “Who are you, and why are you doing this to me?”

“For you,” she corrected. “I am doing this, Valerian, because I’m told that it is in the interest of all elfdom that you survive long enough to inform the Sanctiff that, in your humble opinion, we elves are possessed of that nebulous substance you men call ‘soul,’ and that therefore there is no call for Amorr to direct its next holy war in the direction of Merithaim, Kir Donas, or Elebrion.”