Expedition- Summerlands

by Nathaniel Webb

  “I would like to know if your work is finished,” he said.

  Scytri raised his left hand, palm forward, in a gesture of thinly-veiled annoyance. “She is healed. She will be ready for judgment by the Eldest.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” said the other elf. “I must say, I do not see the purpose in using your talents on her. Her judgment will surely be death.”

  “Until then, she is our guest,” Scytri replied.

  The gold-clad elf gave me a long looked from narrowed eyes. I stared back, trying my best to look ignorant and innocent. He pursed his lips, then turned back to the door. The black candle caught his eye, and he examined it with exaggerated interest.

  “Not long now, I would say.”

  “Do you need anything else?” said Scytri.

  The elf moved out into the hallway, then turned, his right hand raised again. “Thank you for your time.” He shut the door with a decisive click.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “He is Eneri,” said Scytri. “He serves the Eldest. Come, can you stand?”

  He knelt and put a hand on my shoulder just as he’d stirred me earlier. I wondered if he woke his sons the same way when they overslept.

  “I think so,” I said. My head still felt hollow and airy, like an overfilled balloon, and I was punch drunk, almost giddy, with relief at the lack of pain.

  I stood uncertainly and followed Scytri into the hall, squinting against the light of torches that guttered along the wall. The whole structure seemed to be made of wood, roughly cut and hastily assembled. I would have sworn that my cell had walls of cold, damp stone, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  Scytri closed the door of my cell gently behind us and we set out down the short corridor, passing half a dozen identical doors on both sides.

  “Are my friends in there?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” Scytri replied.

  “Where are we going?” We reached a heavy, iron-banded door at the end of the hall, which Scytri opened to reveal a long dirt tunnel leading sharply upwards, with a rough, crumbling staircase cut into its floor. I vaguely remembered being hauled down similar stairs in a feverish haze when I was first taken captive. We ascended and passed through an archway into bright sunlight. The exit had been cut directly into the side of a low, grassy hill, and elven guards stood stony-faced on either side.

  We were in the military camp I’d seen on our approach, near the back of a valley made by two high stone ridges. Colored canvas tents filled the intervening flatland from ridge to ridge, and stretched farther than I could see in front of us. Unlike the little camp we’d seen near the Wall, which had been dead and still until Scytri appeared, this one bustled with activity all around us. Tall elven soldiers in long shirts of painted chain mail sat by cookfires, conferred at the flaps of tents, and sat buffing the rust from their long, curved swords and gleaming spears with long shafts of magic-resistant blood oak. The chatter of Elvish sounded everywhere like a forest full of birdsong.

  We set off down the central aisle of the camp, a dirt path that had been pounded as hard as stone by thousands of passing feet. Most of the soldiers ignored us, but some stared openly at me as we passed. I hadn’t felt so watched since the day I’d gone to the police station with Keats. I much preferred the anonymous viewership of my stream.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Scytri as we turned off the main path into a cul-de-sac made from a dozen tents painted with bright images of harpies pierced with arrows.

  “To speak with my progenitor,” he replied. A few soldiers hailed him with their right hands, and he replied with his left, like a general returning a salute.

  “Is that the Eldest?”

  Scytri stopped and turned on me; his gray eyes caught me and held me pinned like a bug under a magnifying glass.

  “No,” he said. “You will see the Eldest when the candle burns down.”

  “Then who’s the progenitor?”

  “My progenitor.” Scytri started off down the muddy path again, talking as he went. “The Eldest leads us all. My progenitor leads my imru.”

  “Imru?” That was a new one.

  “The imru is the progenitor and all his children, and their children, and so on.”

  “So the Eldest is like a… high chieftain?” I had to use the English words, but Scytri seemed to understand. “Is he a progenitor, too?”

  “He can be. The Eldest is a title, given to the oldest person who leads an imru, but he need not be the progenitor of that imru. Whichever imru has the oldest progenitor is the most esteemed, but not every imru has a living progenitor. Certainly not anymore. You see?”

  I didn’t really, but we seemed to have reached our destination, which was a tent at the back of the cul-de-sac. It was remarkably plain compared to the others, with no decoration, though it was easily the largest of the group. Scytri greeted the guards who stood holding spears on either side of the open flap, then ducked into the tent.

  I followed him and found myself in a dim, cool space where a single elf stood over a table covered in maps and papers. He turned as we came in and I nearly gasped. His face was pitted with scars like little divots taken from his flesh and his right eye was swollen and droopy. Otherwise he showed no signs of being any older or more infirm than the other elves I’d seen. He wore the same mail armor as his soldiers, with a long red vest over it.

  Scytri approached him and raised both hands, palms forward; the other elf touched the backs of his hands to Scytri’s palms in greeting. They exchanged a few murmured words, then the progenitor’s eyes drifted over Scytri’s shoulder to me.

  “Welcome, Linnaea,” he said. His voice was husky and soft. “It has been nearly a decade since I’ve seen one of your people. I am sorry we had to meet under such circumstances.”

  “I’m honored,” I replied. “I think we got off on the wrong foot with your people.”

  “The wrong foot?” The progenitor cocked his head.

  “A human expression,” I said, and the progenitor smiled. “It means, um… we had a bad first meeting. Which I would like to fix.”

  “As would I.” The progenitor turned back to his papers, and waved for me to join him. “As you can see, we are planning a war.”

  I took in the pile of maps and orders written in neat Elvish script. Translating any of the writing would have taken serious effort, but the maps clearly showed the land between the Wall and Wellpoint, with geographical features like the Wyvern Peaks draw in neat black ink and a small star for the town of Wyatt Falls.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  The progenitor took a long breath in through his nose and blew it out. “Do you remember when your people first came here, eight years ago?”

  “Eight?” I blinked. “It’s been five years.”

  “Five years since your second group came through,” the progenitor said. “The first came three years before that.”

  I shook my head blankly.

  “They were different from you. It was a small group of men, rough and dirty. Their weapons and armor were similar, though their language was different. They claimed the land where they came through and built a great hall in the meadows there.”

  Something clicked over in my memory: the Viking-looking ruin I’d seen outside Wellpoint. It all made sense, the pieces coming together in a rush. Time worked differently in the Summerlands; they’d discovered that when the First Ranger Group disappeared through the portal for three days and came back insisting they’d only been in the Summerlands for ten minutes. Expedition Games had found a way to keep the portal permanently open, forcing time to run the same in both worlds with the exception of the missing hour, but it hadn’t always been that way. So if three years had passed here before humans returned—I did some quick mental math—it would have been something like a thousand years on Earth.

  “You met Vikings,” I said.

  “Vikings?” Scytri raised an eyebrow.

  “An ancient warrior culture from our world,” I
explained. “From a thousand years ago. Time doesn’t work the same way here. What happened to them?”

  “We came to greet them,” the progenitor said. “All of the progenitors went—nobody wished to be left out. The meeting turned hostile, then to bloodshed. We killed them all, and returned to our imrua, thinking the matter had been settled. But then the plague began.”

  “The plague… your scars?”

  The progenitor nodded. “I am the lucky one, the one who survived. I am the only living progenitor. But our society is in upheaval and the plague stills ravages our people.”

  “You can’t cure it? Scytri fixed my arm. He saved my life.”

  “I can’t cut away an infection I can’t see.” Scytri shook his head sadly. “And our callers cannot reach the spirits of the disease. It is the same with you humans, as though you have no spirits at all.”

  I was reminded of the times my magic had failed against other humans. Did we lack something that the creatures of the Summerlands had, something that red magic needed to latch onto? White magic seemed to work well enough, which was a mercy considering how heavily adventurers in the Summerlands relied on magical healing.

  “This is all incredible,” I said, “but it still doesn’t explain why you’re planning a war. Or why you’re telling your enemy about it.”

  The progenitor tapped the maps in front of him. “This war is the work of the Eldest. We are sworn to obey him, but… the Eldest was given his title after the plague took all the other progenitors. He was not at the parley with the Vikings. He does not know how that moment balanced on the edge of a cliff, how a single wrong word tipped us over into killing. He sees the pain and death caused by the plague and he blames the humans. Eight years ago he set us to build a great wall in case any more of your people should come through, but the wall was not completed, so now he commands us to kill you all.”

  “But you don’t agree,” I said.

  “I do not,” the progenitor agreed. “I wish only for peace and an end to the plague. This is why I volunteered Scytri to guard the wall, in the hopes that when humans came, we might be the first to meet them. Of course the Eldest, suspecting my motives, sent Eneri to enforce his will. Scytri has told me how Eneri ordered him to attack you. Though we are the highest imru, when the Eldest speaks, even we must obey.”

  ***

  Scytri returned me to my cell, where the black candle had burned down to a tiny stub. Every now and then it flitted out of existence, then sprang back to life as some bit of wick or wax caught fire again.

  My judgment at the hands of the Eldest was coming, soon, and from what I’d been told, I had no reason to expect mercy or reason from him. Scytri and his progenitor clearly felt powerless to resist him. I needed a plan to keep myself alive.

  In the waning light of the candle I noticed a dark shape on the floor: Scytri’s leather case. He’d forgotten it in his hurry to bring me to the progenitor after Eneri’s visit. Squinting in surprise, I flipped it open and felt around its shadowy interior. It took me a moment to realize what I was touching, but when I did, I gasped aloud: surgical equipment, scalpels and little saws, Scytri’s backup plan in case his magic hadn’t worked on his human patient.

  I grabbed a straight, slender knife and slipped it into my pocket just as the black candle went out.

  The door opened, but it wasn’t Scytri. Instead, two soldiers I didn’t recognize grabbed me roughly by the arms and pulled me to my feet. As they dragged me into the hallway and shut the door, I tried to keep my body between them and Scytri’s case, and if they noticed it they didn’t react. I got my feet under me in the hallway and by the time we made it up the stepped tunnel to outside, the guards had let me go and were merely flanking me with swords at the ready.

  It took half an hour to walk the length of the valley, during which time the sun disappeared over the western ridge and blue night came. A faint chill had crept in by the time we arrived at a tent that was more like a pavilion, huge and round with guards encircling it and torches burning in a line to the entrance like lights on a runway. My guards led me down this path and through the dark opening into the tent of the Eldest.

  He stood on a low platform of blood oak, wearing a heavy robe made from patches of various muted colors. He was the only elf I’d seen who bore any signs of age, just a few lines on his face and faint crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. His hair was glossy and black, and as long as Scytri’s.

  Cass, Noah, and Magpie stood at the foot of the platform, and my thoughts reeled drunkenly as I was shoved past a few spear-wielding guards to stand with Hearthammer. My friends looked up at my arrival; Magpie gave me a wan smile and Noah’s face was carefully blank, but Cass stared at me with rage burning in two eyes swollen nearly shut with bruises. She had purple and green marks up and down her arms, and her shirt was torn and filthy.

  The knife in my pocket felt like a stone. It seemed incredible that it hadn’t dragged me to the ground with its dangerous weight, and yet there I stood, only a few feet from the Eldest, with a weapon at hand. I slipped a few fingers into my pocket and touched the knife’s handle. The words of the spell I’d learned from Naila’s NPC friends rose in my mind: an enchantment to give a weapon supernatural sharpness and an almost-intelligent capability for finding a target’s vital spots. With it, I could turn the little surgeon’s knife into a deadly weapon. All I had to do was jump onto the platform, close with the Eldest, and cut him down.

  I felt the idea calling to me, drawing me like gravity, as though I’d fallen into a well headfirst with nothing left to do but watch the ground rush up to break my neck. If I survived, I would be a hero, the girl who killed the enemy general. I would carry a credibility that someone like Dr Agony, with all his little adventures under his belt, could only dream of approaching. He would be nothing next to me, a poseur.

  My ratings would go through the roof.

  “You are here for judgment,” said the Eldest in round, deep tones. His words filled the room without him so much as raising his voice. “Your crimes are the crimes of all your people.”

  Another thought reared up in my mind, standing like a black stone as the foaming waves of my dreams of glory crashed and broke around it. If I killed the Eldest, it would validate every terrible thing he must be saying about humanity. The war would start with his death and it wouldn’t stop until every human in the Summerlands had been cut down. I could see the curved swords of the elves rising and falling like sickles, see the flames leaping from house to house in Wellpoint, see the bodies stacked like firewood in Portal Square.

  Or maybe the humans would beat back the elven army and carry the war back over the Wall. There was no telling what Expedition Games would do to protect their investment. For all their magic, the elves would be doomed the moment Apollonia Blomhaugen decided to start importing machine guns and missiles. The green grass of the Summerlands would run red as the place turned from heaven to hell.

  I took my hand off the knife. If there were any chance to protect the innocence of the world we’d found, I had to take it, even if it meant my own death.

  “Sepharad, Jessamine, Magpie.” The Eldest spoke in tones of finality. “I sentence you to death for your crimes of violence against us. Scytri, you will carry out the sentence.” I glanced over my shoulder in surprise to see that Scytri had come in behind us, Eneri at his side. Scytri hung his head obediently.

  “Linnaea.” The Eldest turned his gaze on me. His eyes were deep black pools. “I sentence you to act as sole survivor. You will ride to war with us and see your people slain, then carry the news back to your world.”

  I tried to face him, to stare back without fear, but I couldn’t. I lowered my eyes.

  “Scytri, Eneri, Teneru, Imhan.” The elves he named straightened to attention. “If these humans have found us, others cannot be far behind. We must go to war immediately. Make ready to ride in the morning. And Scytri… do not shirk your duties.”

  ***

  Scytri and his soldiers bro
ught us back to his imru’s corner of the camp. Hearthammer walked in silence, afraid to meet each other’s eyes. I wanted desperately to apologize, to try to explain. But every time I found myself about to speak, I remembered that telling my story would mean admitting that I could understand the elves, and that would mean telling Noah, Cass, and Magpie that they were sentenced to die while I survived.

  The decision was taken out of my hands as soon as we entered the tent of Scytri’s progenitor. The plague-scarred elf beckoned us to his table and took my hands.

  “I have been told of your sentence,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  “I’m worried about my friends,” I said.

  “We will see what we can do for them,” the progenitor replied. “Though I do not know that it will matter in the end.”

  “Um, Linnaea?” That was Cass, leaning around Magpie, who stood open-mouthed, and waving for my attention. “Em? Emma?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Can you speak Elvish?” Noah asked.

  “A bit,” I admitted.

  “Her speech is very good,” said Scytri in Elvish.

  “What did he say?” said Noah.

  “He said I’m pretty good at Elvish.”

  “Uh, are you guys friends?” Cass asked. “What exactly is happening right now? Who was that old guy? Are we in trouble?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We are. And I’m so sorry, because—”

  “You speak Elvish?” Magpie burst out. He began to laugh. “How? How? You’re a genius! We’ve only been here a month!”

  “I just listened,” I said, feeling my face flush.

  “You just listened.” Magpie shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

  “I believe you were in the middle of apologizing,” said Cass tightly.

  I put a hand on Magpie’s chest and pushed him gently out of the way so I could face Cass head on.

  “I should have listened to you,” I said. “A bunch of times. I got… I was really enjoying success.”

  “You think?” One eyebrow stood in a dire arch on Cass’s face.

  “Too much,” I said. “It’s addictive, I guess, I don’t know. That’s no excuse. We decided years ago that you were party leader, but then we got here and I just thought I could do a better job than you, and… now we’re in so much trouble.”