A Hero's throne tae-2

by Ross Lawhead

  “I’m sure that whatever you see and experience is not for my ears-security of the state and all that-so I will now withdraw. There are quill and parchment behind you if your aide wishes to take notes. I recommend that he does, for the impressions that you will receive, although true, are also subjective, and nuances will pass from you in time.”

  The elf left and, although he did not want to, Daniel watched in dread as the prince stepped forward and picked up one of the scoops. He dipped it in Kay Marrey’s jar-Daniel could see now that Kay had many scratches on his face that opened to reveal the grey, bloodless flesh below-and then raised the cup to his lips and drank it back in one gulp, apparently not queasy or phased by the idea at all.

  He took a step back and his eyes rolled back in his head. “I see Mayine’s Mountain, I am standing on the north side, about two-thirds of the distance up. There is a cliff face in front of me, and what appears to be a sheer surface, but which I know to be a well-disguised entrance with many overlapping pillars-so many that I must dismount and lead my beast through them by his snout.

  “I’m going to report back to the prince, the true heir to the throne-no, it is not he, it is I, I am the true ruler-” The prince seemed to struggle internally and frowned, distaste twisting his face. He was obviously channelling Kay Marrey, Daniel realised, and the way his eyes flicked upward and darted back and forth, it seemed he was seeing what Kay had seen, but the shared consciousness was obviously experiencing conflict at the concept of rightful rule.

  “Sire,” said his aide, moving away from the desk and placing a hand on the other’s arm. “These are the shadows and projections of a traitorous mind-distasteful though they may be, allow them to pass through you.”

  Prince Kione Traast grunted, though remained in his dreamlike state. “I see him before me now, the snivelling bastard orphan. He greets me with sickening propriety. What a ponce, surrounded in wild squalor that he believes makes him noble and righteous. The living martyr, the unjust-”

  “Sire, please.”

  “There is a table before him, and upon it are splayed documents, designs, and diagrams. There is a map. It shows the places of those still traitorously loyal to the true crown of the rebel crown.”

  “Reproduce the map, sire,” the aide said, pushing a quill into his hand and laying a blank sheet of parchment in front of the prince.

  His eyes still staring sightlessly upward, the prince began to scribble and draw a remarkably well-detailed map of what Daniel presumed was that area of Elfland. The mountain was in the centre, and as Kione Traast continued drawing, Daniel could see the plain that he seemed to keep waking up in the middle of, and the outline of the forest that K?yle and Pettyl lived in, and then the settlements that lay beyond that where the Fayre had been held, as long as many other details of the country. He watched as the prince completed the map and then marked the map with names and descriptors of those who were loyal to the Elves in Exile. The aide and guards stood and watched him patiently as the quill scratched upon the surface of the vellum for a good ten or fifteen minutes.

  Then his hand slowed and he took a step back.

  “My prince?” the aide asked. “The vision is fading. Would you like another draught?” He gestured to the jar with Marrey’s head in it.

  The prince shook his head. He went over to the counter and leaned against it. One of the guards brought him a stool. “What is it?” the prince asked, lowering himself. “What did I speak? What did I see?”

  The aide spread the dictation he took and the map that Kione Traast had drawn in front of him. The prince studied them for a moment and then brushed them aside.

  “Useless. We raided the mountain fortress weeks ago and captured this document, along with the others.”

  The aide pursed his lips. “Well, we suspected as much. Here, try the other,” he said, holding the other silver scoop out.

  The prince made a face as if it were his mother telling him to finish his strained prunes, but nonetheless grabbed the cup and dipped it into K?yle’s jar. He took a sip and finished it off, then he just sat, staring at nothing, for about twenty minutes.

  “Nothing,” he said eventually, shaking his head. “It was just music. Wordless, pointless music. Come, let us waste no more time here.”

  He rose and swept out of the room, his entourage in his wake.

  The door slammed and Daniel stayed, gazing morosely at the jars containing the heads of two men that he had considered friends in this strange world. There would be no rescue or escape for them.

  III

  Daniel awoke. Although heavily traumatised and confused, he knew exactly where he was-back in the middle of the massive plain again. Memory of the events in the Night were already scurrying away from him, leaving only scars behind them. He prodded gently at them to see if they gave anything up, but once again it was only just impressions-nothing like the violent clarity of the first time. The echo of pain and flashes of odd images,

  conversations, and confrontations. Then the impressions of what had remained finally dissolved away.

  He wondered how long he’d been in the Night, and what was happening here now. The events of what happened before the Night seemed like a long, long way away now, as an old man might remember a distant childhood. The vivid emotion was still real, but detached.

  What was going on in Ni?ergeard?

  Ni?ergeard-that brought something back. He had seen the golden and silver riders again, he remembered. He thought that he always saw them at the end of his times in the Night. He couldn’t remember if that was the case, but somehow that fact felt right. He feared the silver rider and knew, inherently, that it was vital that he escape him and his “dreams of death.” But the silver rider was more than just death-it was pain, fear, and all the bad things of life. The golden rider was hope, security, romance, all the things worth saving. He had to keep hold of that. He remembered the picture he’d received during his first Night-him, sitting on a throne of victory, his enemies’ bones at his feet. Freya by his side, a new rule of the nation of Ni?ergeard-part of a New United Kingdom of the Spirit. That was clear. That was the reality he needed to strive for, to produce through his will, if such a thing were possible. He would be the king of a new country, just as Wales and Scotland were a part of Great Britain, but one that the world had never seen, unless the stories of King Arthur and the holy kings of legend were true.

  At least, that had been one of the visions. But he also knew that although they had all been visions of victory and triumph, not all of them were good. And then, perhaps, not every victory was perfect. Life was complicated, and it seemed to Daniel likely that these visions would help him to make sense of his own future. He was closer to a spiritual plane here, and if a revelation were to be had, then he would find it and bring it back, somehow, to his own world.

  But what would the cost be? The Night was brutal and horrific, quite literally a hell. And the things that worried him most-beyond the pain, or its inevitability if he continued to stay in this world-was that he nearly always forgot what he experienced, and every time he came back, less of him seemed to make it. His confidence and righteousness had been eaten away to the point that he was now questioning if he could indeed accomplish anything of worth here in Elfland, or back at home, for that matter. His surety of purpose was faltering.

  He sat for another few hours, trying to puzzle out all the logic and fuzzy philosophy of his situation. Then he rose and almost automatically began searching for the Elves in Exile again. If helping them win this battle was part of his penance, then he should get on with it. The problem was that he had no assurance at all that this was a penance, or that there were lessons to be learned.

  After a long time of searching, he saw a smudge on the horizon in the southeast that he took to be smoke, and he navigated himself toward that. Whatever it was, he was certain that it was something to do with the war, or would give information that would lead him to it. With such a focal point, he made much quicker progress and had
the scene in view in what seemed like less than a minute.

  It was a battlefield, but one that had already been spent. The “field” itself was actually several fields spread between two forests-it was apparently part of an elfish farm, entirely open except for low walls, ditches, ridges, and hedges demarcating one cropland from another. The fight had ranged over at least a dozen of these spaces. Daniel had no experience in evaluating or judging what had occurred here, but the battle looked hard fought. Bodies of elfish warriors were spread all over, sometimes clustering here, sometimes there. There were also horses, so many horses, laying everywhere, dead and dying. Many more were tethered to the walls that ran along the side of the fields where a dirt road meandered. The two fighting sides must have been entirely mounted.

  Warriors in what looked to be blue enamelled armour trimmed with black were walking over the field, dragging the wounded-indiscriminate of side, it seemed-off the field and into a circle of elfish healers. These were the victors, apparently, and Daniel wondered who they represented.

  The smoke he had spotted came from a patch of grassland at the far end of the field of conflict, which was near a copse of tall, birch-like trees. Here some tents and furniture were smouldering, and the figures in blue were trying desperately to put it out. The tent had been collapsed and the canvas pulled away from what was underneath it, which was papers, journals, and silken cloths. These were spread out and stamped on with a mindful precision in order to extinguish their smoking edges. There was a man shouting orders to these soldiers, and Daniel drifted lower to hear what was being said.

  “Faster, you lugheads! Put those papers out! Quickly and well! No, not like that, like this! They’ll smoulder into oblivion unless you do it properly. Don’t you know that destruction of vital knowledge of the enemy is treason? Your lives depend on this act, so let’s pretend we all actually care about your miserable existences and step keenly!”

  So, the actions weren’t so noble, as Daniel first thought, as to extinguish a fire so close to a wooded area. Daniel drifted upward and spotted a cluster of elves wearing more than the usual amount of armour and ornamentation. These must be the captains and generals. He went toward them. One of them was Prince Kione Traast from the necrologist’s halls.

  “Hurry them up,” he was saying, annoyed, to a cluster of clerical-looking elves. “The ground is starting to eat the blood and you know how they’ll only complain when they see that our wounded are being moved.”

  “It does no good to rush them, my prince,” said one unflappablelooking elf. “Battlescrying is an ancient art and one that demands much anticipation.”

  “Well, then it’s their own cursed fault if things move. I don’t want to hear any excuses or blame from them.”

  A young messenger came running from the field behind the prince. “They are ready, my prince.”

  Behind him, from the woods, strode four elderly elves in red robes and each one was wearing thin, bone-like stilts that allowed them to tower above all others on the battlefield. They also carried long, black poles that could reach down to the ground. They stood roughly two storeys above anyone else around.

  “Clear the field!” shouted one of the prince’s captains. “All of you that can move, clear the field for the battlescryers!”

  The soldiers did so, rushing to the edges of the open areas as the four stilted elves stalked into the fields. Their manner was easy and adept and rather eerie as complete silence and attention was given to their activities.

  Their increased foot spans gave them surprising speed across the plains, and they used their black poles to move certain objects that they deemed to be in the way. Occasionally they would place their walking sticks in the ground behind them and sit on them in a tripod fashion as they made notes and created diagrams on square books that they carried in a satchel at their waists. They seemed particularly interested in how the bodies had fallen, and how they were clustered, and what relation the fallen apparently had with each other. Daniel could hear them murmuring across to one another.

  “There are three brothers, here, there, and there-do you see? Each bears an emblem on his shield with a purple, eight-pointed star. Can another be found?”

  “I have one here, a youth of perhaps eighty,” came a reply in a low, sullen voice.

  “He would be the youngest, then. How is he oriented?”

  “Feet to the sun, head to the wind, hands to his heels.”

  This made all of them pause to record this information, and then they began circling the scene again. Another brother was found and they all halted and recorded this discovery with much muted excitement.

  Their work apparently finished, they strode back across the plain and alighted with surprised dexterity from their stilts and stood a little apart from the prince and his entourage and conferred awhile, comparing notes.

  “Most august and glorified ruler of elf,” said the foremost. “We have finished our divinations.”

  “And?”

  The battle diviner straightened himself and reported in an authoritative voice:

  One body dead with no cut or break in the skin-a high fort will shoot thrice time ten.

  Two carrion birds upon a hand-a captain wounded.

  Four fallen from the east-fair weather at the next engagement.

  Eight headless helmets-lost wealth on a rainy morning.

  Nine white worms around a boot-horse sickness for three days.

  Overlapping wrists: thirteen-the number of days to travel.

  Fifteen flies on one breastplate-fortune for felons.

  Thirty-nine broken shields-ships will stay at sea.

  Eleven gauntlets lost, eleven buckles loosed, eleven heels covered-store half your provisions.

  Eight by nine the field of Elven slain-shelter under the canopy. Forty-three within the centre-welcome the first blow.

  Twenty-three giving northward supplication-a spy in the fifth ring.

  Nine enemies on the fifth level-ride to the South.

  These numbers: one, two, four, eight, nine, thirteen, fifteen, thirty-nine. . acquisition, forceful reciprocity, remuneration, fortunate remembrance, a diverse mind, a quick eye.

  These numbers: thirty-three, seventy-two, forty-three, twenty-three, forty-five. . changeable fortunes, the stars hidden, a mask unused.

  Five brothers-the end of conflict in three weeks.

  Four of the brothers with three wounds-finality on the midday.

  Three brothers to the west-the location of the next field.

  Two brothers supplicant-victory at a great cost.

  One brother outside of the square-a claimant abandoned.

  The priest-like elf stopped his recitation.

  “That’s all well and good,” the prince said, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and ring finger. “But where does that leave me?”

  “An end of the campaign in twenty-two days, an unexpected boon in ten. A fortunate departure by the end of the day.”

  The prince grunted and dismissed the warpriests. “Keep up pursuit with our runners. Report back to me when they’ve caught track of the leaders. Where’s the human? I would speak with him.”

  The aide made a face. “He would be with the rest of the train-back along the road. The warriors do not like him. They believe such a thing brings bad luck. He is too interested in the prisoners, they feel.”

  “He is a valuable oracle, and I would hear his counsel.”

  “Yes, my prince.”

  Kione Traast surveyed the landscape. “Unless they flee to the lake, which I doubt, then they will be doubling back. It would be better for us to rejoin the train. Give the orders to return. And next time bring the man with the entourage.”

  “Very well, my lord. It will be done.”

  Daniel rose up and now faced a decision. He was intrigued by this talk of a human, but it may be better if he meet up with the elves escaping from the battlefield and aid them in their flight.

  But there was also talk of prisoners, and h
e wondered who they might be-it could be anyone, since he hadn’t determined how long the Night had kept him this time. It could be either of the generals, one of the wizards, or the prince himself. And then he might glimpse the human too. .

  Daniel decided to look into it. He could easily be there in a matter of minutes, and if he saw nothing, then he would quickly be on his way to Prince Filliu.

  He started swiftly along the paved road and before too long the elfish war host’s encampment could be seen on the road ahead. Daniel slowed, not because he was cautious anymore, but because he needed to take it in.

  It looked much like the Fayre he had visited on his first trip to Elfland, but populated by a very different looking type of elf. Where the Fayre had attracted colourful and pageant-like elves, this one was full of warriors in sparkling gear and weaponry, and their attendants who dressed and behaved more utilitarian. Inspecting the tents and the elves passing in and around them, he found butchers and bakers bustling around baking pits, herders tending to strange livestock that looked like massive, ornately horned oxen, drink-makers pulping and distilling fruits that had been harvested from the nearby wilderness. There were smiths working industriously at repairing sword blades, shields, and odd pieces of armour. Fletchers were creating arrows and unstringing and steaming bows, and there were any number of elves doing a dozen other tasks.

  But where would he find this “human,” who was trusted by the prince, but not by anyone else?

  From helping the Elves in Exile, he had a passing familiarity with how they organised up their military camps. He quickly located the prince’s tent, which was a deep blue trimmed by dark purple banners and pennants. Because he couldn’t see into it, he had to materialise at the entrance and push his way through.

  “Hello?” a voice called out in Elvish.

  Daniel instantly dissolved into the air.

  The tent was just a single, large space, not separated into different rooms by fine cloths and carpets as they usually were. Lush rugs were strewn across the ground and a black polished wood table the size of a merry-go-round dominated the centre of the area.