The Revenge of the Elves

by Gary Alan Wassner

  “Maybe Oleander gave it to her when last they met?” Alemar suggested, though she barely understood what he was talking about.

  “No, Princess. He didn’t have it,” the wizard replied, though hardly realizing it was she who spoke, he was so wrapped up in his own thoughts. “He of course knew of it…”

  “How could he then send her on this mission if she was doomed to fail without it?” Giles asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “If Oleander didn’t have it, where is it? What has my uncle Bristar to do with this?” Alemar questioned. Nothing was straight forward. Nothing was obvious.

  “It was elsewhere and had been for a long time, hidden deep within the caves above Crispen, safe in the depths of Silandre. As I said, I informed Bristar of it when we met in Seramour. He was to have provided it at the proper moment. My brother would never have informed the Armadiel of it and thus placed the map’s fate in the claws of the beast and out of his own! Hmmm,” he pondered again. “Bristar would have recovered it unless the beast delayed him. He knew the importance of it,” he said, perplexed himself now. “That must have been why Colton released the beast into the mountain! A distraction! The ultimate foil! But how did my brother know the map had been removed from Parth’s protection? Of those who knew, who would have informed him? And why?” His expression grew grim and troubled. “He was unaware of the location of the key, just as he was unaware of where the map had been dispatched to for safekeeping. At least I assumed he was!” Premoran continued this dialogue with himself. The pieces fell into place as he spoke. “‘Doomed to fail’,” he repeated Giles’ words. “But what if Oleander never intended the map to be destroyed but only wished it to appear so?” He bolted upright. “Tamara would never have known the parchment wasn’t properly disposed of. She would have cast it into the well as she was instructed to do. She would have watched as it fell from her hands and she would have returned to Parth assuming she’d completed her task successfully! Without having been informed of the key, she would not have recognized the keyhole for what it was!” he said in one breath. “It would have lain there at the bottom of the well!”

  “Appeared to whom?” Giles asked. “Why would Oleander wish to deceive the sister?” Premoran had lost him many sentences ago.

  “And everyone else as well who knew of her mission?” Alemar asked. This seemed impossibly contrived. “If Colton knew this, who informed him?”

  “The choices are not many,” Premoran said, the options ominous and unthinkable.

  “Then it may not have been destroyed after all!” Alemar exclaimed, ignoring the implications Premoran raised or, perhaps, not recognizing the seriousness of them.

  “No. And if my brother knew that the sister’s efforts would have to fail, that the key could not be taken from the mountain, and therefor would not arrive in time…”

  “Then he could have retrieved the map himself,” Teetoo completed his sentence.

  “But, if I’m following you, it may be safe then. Without this key, it could not have been cast to its doom!” Alemar said.

  “Or still vulnerable. We have not yet made that determination,” Teetoo said.

  “The timing was wrong. Mintar was dying and the shard needed to be recovered as well! A coincidence? Unlikely!” Premoran shouted as he pounded his thighs with his fists. He swung around to face them.

  “Mintar chose to die in order to distract your brother from gaining possession of the map?” Teetoo asked. The prospect was fearful to imagine.

  “It’s a tragic conclusion but perchance a true one!” Premoran replied. “The importance of the shard was preeminent. The Lalas knew that and so did Colton. The 11th shard….”

  “But Caeltin failed to gather either,” Alemar said. It still made no sense to her.

  “We assume. But the fate of the map is unknown to me,” he responded. “With each answer comes a new question.”

  “And new dangers,” Alemar added, as if the existing ones weren’t serious enough.

  “Tamara has both the shard and the map?” Teetoo asked. “Is it not foolish for one person to hold two such important things?”

  “The shard she most definitely possesses. I know it, I can sense it. But she no longer retains the map,” Premoran announced through half-closed eyes.

  “Has she reached Odelot? Can you tell that too?”

  “No, Giles, she has not,” he said in a hushed voice, as if watching her progress as he spoke.

  “Can we do something? Can we help?” Alemar asked. She felt powerless, vulnerable.

  “Possibly. But not from here! No, not from here. First we must determine how my brother gained this much knowledge and from whom! Like the layers of an onion, we see through one only to discover another beneath it, and another after that.”

  “And then?” Alemar asked. “What if whoever has the map also finds the key? It may yet be cast to its doom, whether Oleander intended it to be or not!”

  “I can’t make any sense of this,” Giles admitted. He tried to follow what they said but he couldn’t. His mind was about to explode. “Every time I think I’m beginning to understand, something new befuddles me.”

  “What did Oleander actually have in mind, do you suppose? Do you think he was the one who informed Colton of the map’s whereabouts? Why?” Alemar asked with disbelief. She understood. She finally saw where Premoran’s thoughts were leading, dreadful as that place was. “Are we to believe Mintar’s death was a beguilement, a mere distraction? To what end? To prevent Caeltin from gaining possession of something he wouldn’t even have known about had the Lalas not informed him to begin with?”

  “To what end?” Premoran repeated in a more somber tone. “Perhaps to gain his trust,” he whispered.

  “Mintar died for that? By the First, why would Oleander even want it?” Alemar scowled, her face reddening.

  “Indeed. Why would he?” Premoran replied.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dalloway watched Caroline’s slender body silhouetted against the dull sky. She stood on a rise about fifteen feet from him, pointing westward with her arm outstretched.

  “This way, Daly!” Caroline shouted. Her voice cut through the still air. “You can see the city from here!”

  “I’m coming. Stay where you are,” he replied, hurrying to meet her.

  The clouds thickened by the minute and a wind ripped across the valley that lay between them and the looming hulk of the ancient city ahead. Its vastness sprawled out before them. The stark stone walls fought to keep their heads above the black sand surrounding them, like a swimmer floundering in a churning sea. Odelot’s formidable enclosure that once rose three hundred and fifty feet into the air, appeared as if it was being swallowed up by the earth. Wavelike dunes lapped against the weather beaten surfaces, creating an uneven landscape of desolation. In places, the walls were totally buried and they could walk right over them into Odelot itself, and in others the enclosure stood tall and forbidding. Towers ringed by carved balustrades rose from various locations behind the walls, but their features were softened by time, appearing blurry and indistinct amidst the shifting sands.

  Dalloway reached her side and looked out over the hill. He couldn’t speak. Together they contemplated the stark scene before them. Odelot exuded a palpable sense of loss, a perception of tragedy and sadness that did not abate. Something great and wondrous had been stilled before its time, and now it stood like a statue of an athlete in motion, frozen for all eternity in the midst of his performance.

  The winds blew and the sand swirled, altering the scene each moment, revealing first a sculpture then an ornamented handrail or a fleeting stone face that vanished seconds later under the amorphous black mounds. Larger gusts uncovered entire buildings, some of which remained exposed, while others disappeared before they could even see them.

  They had agreed that whatever they decided to do with the map, they would do it after finding the well. Both believed there were valid reasons to keep it and to destroy it, and they hoped t
he right course of action would reveal itself at the decisive moment.

  “How are we going to figure out where it is?” Caroline asked. The city was vast and half buried. Every step they took vanished before they could even take another, and once they entered the maze of crumbling buildings, navigating would become more difficult. Doubt undermined her awe.

  “I don’t know.” The city spread out in all directions. Their plan seemed good before, but now….

  “If the well is truly at the world’s end then we need to search in the west of the city where the shore abuts the sea. The buildings farther back are staying in focus, aren’t they? Look! Do you see what I mean? Maybe they’re higher up, above this mess.”

  He peered out over the rooftops and across the city. “They’re more distinct, but I can’t tell if it’s their height that’s keeping the sands at bay or something else. I can see the motion of the sea beyond them.”

  “We’ll have to walk over the whole place to get there.” And through this devastation. Where did all the people go? What happened here? Caroline wondered.

  “We could climb over the wall in one of the spots where it’s almost buried, but the sand is shifting fast and often, by the time we get there it might be covered again.”

  “Those are the main gates, right? They must be,” she answered her own question. “I’d very much like to walk the streets of this city and go in the way it was meant for people to go in. Let’s do that, okay?” To honor them. To respect them. Why is it so quiet?

  “It’ll take us much longer that way. Who knows what kind of shape the buildings are in after all this time. We should get to the well as quickly as we can.” His discomfort was growing and the thought of walking the empty streets was worrisome.

  “But I’d like to see what it was like here. I don’t know why, but I think we should,” Caroline replied. Though she rarely insisted, she made her preferences clear. “Everything’s here. The buildings, the towers, the walls. Something remains of the soul of this place. It has to.” I have to know. It’s so dead. Too dead. Her mind reached out for something, but she didn’t know what.

  “I thought you said you felt nothing here?” he asked, watching her movements. Her sudden interest bothered him. And her tone….

  “I did. I do…” she replied, sounding confused. “Nothing even whispers to me. Nothing.” She was soft, frail. “But just look at it! Look at Odelot! Can you not imagine it when it was full of life? When people walked the streets?” she asked. Her face lit up and she turned to him. “That’s it, Daly!” she exclaimed.

  “What, Caroline?” She spoke like a child sometimes, as if he should know what she was referring to.

  “The dead don’t speak to me, but I can practically see them everywhere. It’s the living who must reanimate those who are gone when their spirits have died too. They live on in us. Do you see?” The sand buried her feet. “I have to walk these streets! I have to.” The wind blew but her clothing hardly stirred.

  “We have to find the well. We can’t afford to wander around.”

  “This must have been such a beautiful place once.”

  “It’s just a lot of empty buildings and black sand. I don’t see any beauty in it.” Death and ruin is what he saw.

  “This is how life ends,” she said. “Just like this.” She looked from side to side, her eyes focused and sharp, her brow creased. And she spoke as if he wasn’t there, as if he could have been anyone.

  He raised his hand to take her arm. “Come, Caroline….”

  She ignored him. “The city has no voice. The cycle’s been interrupted and the dead never returned to the earth. Don’t you understand? This city is beyond death.” She looked at him but she didn’t see him.

  “Let’s go,” Dalloway urged. When she talked like this before, things went badly. “We have to find the well, and I don’t want to stay here any longer than it takes to do that. Though you may find this beautiful I…” he shrugged.

  “Let’s go then,” Caroline replied without waiting for him to finish. She walked toward the half buried arch standing out prominently before them. “That’s definitely the gate.” A huge structure loomed right in front of them.

  They climbed down the hillside and stepped onto the shifting sand. A powerful breeze lifted the fine particles and blew them into their legs, covering the toes of their boots and sticking to the fabric of their clothes.

  “If we stand in one place for long, we’ll disappear!” Dalloway said, immediately regretting his words.

  Caroline barely heard him. She walked on, kicking and brushing the encroaching granules off of her. The shifting sand realigned itself in perfect, eerie silence. The surface muffled their footsteps. A swath of roadway paved with enormous flat stones revealed itself, then disappeared just as fast, affording them a glimpse of what once was.

  “The city’s teasing us, showing us something and then taking it away before we can look at it. Imagine what we’re not seeing!” Caroline remarked, mesmerized by the surroundings. She spoke of Odelot as if it was alive.

  He imagined what treasures must be entombed here. Lives. And bodies too.

  “Treasures and secrets,” she echoed his thoughts. She knew so little about it, about anything outside of her own sheltered world.

  “We never spoke of Odelot in Seramour. It was a human city, not elfin.” Terror and tragedy. Loss. That’s what Odelot was about. Why did she want to hear about it? Why would anyone want to hear about it? He couldn’t understand what interested her.

  “No voices speak to me. It’s so quiet.” She tilted her head as if listening to something.

  “Your father never told you anything?” he asked, and answered his own question before she replied. “Ah, of course not. Why would he? It was probably the farthest thing from his mind.” Dalloway stared at the massive gates. “They’re harsh, forbidding even. Not Elfin. Do you see what I mean?” He rubbed his hand across a mortarless seam between two huge blocks of rock. “There are no runes in the stone, no words of welcome or warning. But most of it’s hidden under the sand.” He didn’t like it here. Not in the slightest. The way the sand shifted before the wind blew, the silence. He trod as lightly as he could.

  “I’ve hardly seen anything in my lifetime except through the eyes of others. And most of them have been animal’s eyes. I can never really tell if their memories of things are accurate or not. I know much about the earth and little about those who inhabit it.” But this place fascinated her.

  “The ages hide many crimes.” And sand does too, he thought.

  Though buried deep beneath the shapeless mounds, the gates were colossal! Despite what time and nature had done to wear them down, they were intact and imposing, defying the space they occupied. A great blast of wind lashed across the area, and they clung to each other so that it wouldn’t carry them away, hiding their eyes and covering their mouths. As the dust settled, one side of the arch stuck out like a sculpted shoulder of some ancient giant, but it angled sharply outward, indicating that the surface beneath it was a great distance off.

  “This whole section of the city is buried. This sand must be hundreds of feet deep!” Dalloway remarked. It shifted under his feet, warm and menacing.

  “At least,” Caroline agreed. “If we wanted to find anything, we would have to dig for ages. Everything is so black against the stone. What made the sand this color, do you think? Is it common?”

  “No. I’ve never seen anything like this either. When the sun shines it glitters. Watch, can you see it?” A streak of light broke through the clouds as he spoke and spread across the surface, a glow-fly sailing down a path.

  “Yes, like tiny pieces of glass.”

  “Look at that tower!” Dalloway exclaimed, pointing to a carved pinnacle standing out on their left. It soared above the shifting surface at least a hundred feet in the air. “This one is taller than the top of the gates, so it must be even further to the ground beneath it.”

  “What do you suppose it was? I’ve never seen
anything like this. It’s beautiful!” The sides of it stretched gracefully into the sky, capped by a turret and a dome of opalescent stone.

  “The palace maybe, or the council chamber. I don’t know much other than that every living thing vanished.” His foot sunk and he yanked it out of the sand.

  “How could a city this immense die and leave no history behind?” Even the animals left traces of their lives when they perished. The woods sang with the voices of those who came before.

  They walked beneath a colossal archway and craned their necks to look up at it. Smooth and unmarked, neither of them could tell if the blowing sand wore away the designs or if it had been created that way to begin with. They couldn’t even see lines where the stones abutted one another, and yet the arch was perfectly shaped, elegant despite its bulk.

  “It’s here, and it has no past that we know of. How strange,” Caroline mused. She expected to be frightened but instead she was spellbound. “And how tranquil.” The sand flew everywhere.

  “This place makes me nervous,” Dalloway said as they entered the city. “I feel like someone’s watching us.” He stepped as lightly as he could.

  “No one is, Daly. I would know. If something were alive….”

  “I sure hope so,” he replied, but he was wary nonetheless. Maybe only the dead resided in Odelot. Caroline didn’t speak to the dead and they didn’t speak to her. At least he didn’t think they did. “Look at that!” He pointed to his left.

  A globe as black as the sand gusting around it hung suspended in mid air in a clearing in front of them. The vague outlines of buildings demarcated the square around it, and they walked right toward it. The wind swept the ground clear, revealing a polished marble path, beckoning them onward. Dalloway hesitated.