by Vox Day
“There is no need to fear me, dwarf.” The wizard shook his head. “When I said I intended you no harm, I meant it.”
Lodi silently lowered his axe, less because he trusted the wizard’s words than because he suspected the weapon was useless to him.
“They dead?” he asked, pointing to the seven guards lying on the ground.
“Unfortunately, yes. Had that young fool there only kept his mouth shut, I would have spared them. But my king would not have Malkan know that we are capable of passing their wards as easily as dwarves pass their walls.”
Lodi took the hint. “Dwarves got no interest in Man wars,” he hastened to assure the wizard.
“I ventured to assume as much. As it seems we now share each other’s secrets, please convey the good wishes of His Majesty to the King of Iron Mountain. Savondir has always held the lords of the underdeep in the utmost regard, and he seeks no conflict with them. Now, would you be so kind as to do me the honor of presenting me to the Lady Everbright?”
The mage’s words were gentle enough, but Lodi recognized the steel underneath them. He shrugged. If the Savonders wanted to sneak a thousand mages inside the walls of Malkan, it was no concern of the dwarves.
“Come out, all of you,” he called. “There is no danger.”
Although he knew it would not do the elfess the least bit of good if the wizard were lying, he was pleased to see the four young dwarves step forward in front of her, acting as a shield of sorts. And he was even more pleased to see the tall wizard nod gravely to them, acknowledging their courage. He suspected the Man knew how unlikely it was that dwarves would lift a finger for an elf, let alone defend one, in normal circumstances.
“This Man is a warmage from Savonder, Dashella,” Lodi told the elfess. “He say he been looking for you for a long time. Man, she call herself Dashella.”
“An honor, Lady Everbright,” the wizard said as he smoothly dropped to one knee and kissed her hand. To Lodi’s surprise, the Man said something in Elvish, something that produced a look of surprise, followed by the barest hint of a smile on the elfess’s long, narrow face. She gave him a reply in the same tongue.
“Alas, my lady Elf, that very nearly approaches the sum total of my knowledge of your tongue. I do beg your pardon. I ask only that you allow me the privilege of escorting you first to Suessa, from whence we will take ship to Oeile. After my colleagues in the art, who are very interested in consulting with you, are able to meet you in Lutèce, you will be provided with an honor guard to the court of your cousin.”
Lodi blinked. The elfess was of the blood royal?
“I know what you want, magic man,” the elfess said in the Man tongue. “But I am no use to you, as you already know. My powers, they are gone.”
The wizard shook his head. “Forgive me, lady, but that is not true. The power may be gone, but you are still of considerable interest to me. Your memory remains. I am sorry for your loss, but the Centre Sagesse has no need of power, not even royal elven power. What we lack is a certain bit of lore that I know is in your possession.”
“Lore?”
“Words. Knowledge. That is all. Nothing more.”
“Which words would that be, precisely?”
The Man smiled and replied in Elvish.
The elfess looked pensive and was quiet for a moment.
“I know the spell of which you speak. It will be of little use to you. Our steeds of the sky cannot be tamed. They are too old and proud to serve Men.”
“I assure you, His Majesty does not covet your sky steeds. No, let me restate that. He harbors no designs on your warhawks, nor does he imagine any will consent to serve him. The spell is needed for another matter entirely.”
“That purpose being…?”
“A noble one. One that will shake the earth.”
The elfess stared at the Man. Lodi noticed for the first time that they were of a height. “That may be, but is it in the interest of my people that the earth be shaken?”
“Come, my lady, you are too intelligent and you have lived far too long to believe that things can remain as they are. Kingdoms wax and wane. Peoples rise and fall. Your people broke the Witchkings and nearly broke themselves in the process. Do the three kingdoms still have the strength to resist Zoth Ommog in the west and the growing power of the empire in the south?”
The Man did not, Lodi noticed with pride, see fit to mention the troll kings. It was the dwarves, and the dwarves alone, who had ended that particular threat. The elfess said nothing, and her silence spoke volumes.
“Furthermore, in giving, your people will receive a gift of rare value in return.”
“How so?”
“Through you, they will be the first to know that noble purpose of which I speak. If it can be done, it will be done. Our Immortels shall succeed eventually, with or without elven assistance. What I seek from you is not the gift of power, but rather the gift of time. One hundred years may be little to an elf, but it is two lifetimes to a king of men.”
“I see.” Lady Everbright looked off into the forest. When her gaze returned to the mage’s face, her eyes were hard. “And what else shall I receive, warmage, if I give your king this gift of time?”
“What is your desire?”
“Vengeance,” she hissed. For the first time since she stabbed the naked man, Lodi saw life in her light green eyes. “I want the race of Man to pay for the insult they have done to me, for the injuries and indignities they inflicted upon me, and most of all, for robbing me of my magic!”
The Savonder smiled grimly. “Will you settle for lives of the men who enslaved and abused you?” He gestured toward the two dead men who had accompanied him. “Note the second payment on that debt. They were in the service of Quadras Aetias, the whoremaster who bought you from the slaver.”
“The first payment?”
“The slaver himself. I killed the man from Orontis two moons past.”
The elfess stared at the mage for a long moment, then reached out her hands to take his. “Thank you,” she said. “And will you kill the rest?”
“Aetias will have records of his clients. All who used you, who insulted you, shall die. Then Aetias himself, and, if you wish it, all of his household.”
“I wish it,” she said imperiously.
“Then you shall have it, in the name of His Majesty Louis-Charles, the King of Savondir and Lord of the Seven Seats.”
Lodi winced, but upon reflection, he decided it was likely for the best. The barely controlled fury he could see flickering in her green eyes might well have led her to demand the massacre of everyone in the city, including the dwarves residing there. And whatever it was that the wizard sought, he wanted it badly enough that he might well be willing to give her one.
“Now,” the wizard said, “as it appears we have more than a few horses at our disposal, may I offer you your choice of mount, my lady?”
Thorvald and Hodli helped Lady Everbright stow a share of the food supplies on the horse selected to serve as the pack horse for her journey, so Lodi took the opportunity to approach the royal battlemage on the other side of the road.
“You say your king be friend to the dwarves, yes?”
The mage looked down at him with a bemused expression on his face. “I believe he wishes to remain on good terms with your people.”
“Then I got one question. The dwarf king will want to know: What is this thing you want from the elf?”
“You can’t imagine I would tell you that.”
“Maybe. See, if you kill me, or if I make sign to the lads, they kill your elf.”
The Man’s bemusement abruptly vanished. He glanced sharply at the two dwarves closest to the elfess. Thorvald winked at him and adroitly twirled the axe in his hand.
“You rescued her. You expect me to believe you would kill her now?”
Lodi snorted. “Why not? Don’t play fool with me, magic man. I know slavers, and I knows a setup when I sees one. How you know what slaver to kill? How you know
where he from? I thinks you set this up. You had her catched by the slaver, but he don’t sell her to you. You get outbid by that rich whoremaster in Malkan, and you don’t even know it. That’s why you kill the Oronti: He double-cross you. No wizard know nothing about slavers, but I buys from them many times. They double-cross their mother if they get just one more copper.”
For a moment, the wizard looked nonplussed. Then he shook his head ruefully. “Yes, well, I imagine it would have saved me a considerable amount of trouble to have hired you as an advisor from the start. But what was your interest in her? My understanding is that dwarves customarily have little use for elves.”
“We got lots of interest for an elf they pay gold to get back. I didn’t know she was a cousin to the Forest King, but I knowed she’d be worth something. Now, I want my gold, and I be thinking the dwarf king should be knowing what you Savonders is about. I knows we can’t stop you. I don’t even knows that we want to stop you. We don’t stick our beards in Man business. But we likes to knows what’s going on over our heads. So tell me, give me my gold, and then you can send the elf to the Dark if you like.”
The wizard pursed his lips. Lodi had the impression that he was trying to decide if he could kill them all fast enough and still preserve his long-sought prize. Finally, he shrugged in acquiescence.
“Very well, dwarf. It’s a small enough price and will do no harm. Look to the skies, my inquisitive friend. Not tomorrow, not next year, but I’m told you are a long-lived people. When you see fire in the sky, then you may tell your king under the mountains that the shaking of the earth is nigh.”
Lodi nodded and made a mental note to urge the King of the Underdeep to see that the deep strongholds under the mountain were well-supplied in the years to come. Even a dwarf could see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
The wizard had gone to dangerous lengths in seeking a specific spell used to control flying beasts. Fire. The sky burning and the earth shaking. Dragons! Even the evil witchmen of the north, with all their dark and demonic arts, had never managed to tame dragons! He stifled the urge to laugh at the wizard’s lunatic purpose and somehow managed to limit himself to a knowing nod.
“Do you understand, then? I suppose you must be rather more quick-witted than you look.” The wizard smiled, but there was little humor in his eyes. “Well, my bearded friend, I shall now bid you adieu. To the matter of the gold: As I would not have you suffer any loss for the services you have rendered to the crown, do allow me to compensate you for it.”
Lodi hid a satisfied smile beneath his beard as the mage produced a small, heavy-looking leather bag, which he was certain contained at least ten coins. Gold, he hoped. Any thought of warning the elfess of the Savonder’s role in her enslavement vanished—he’d thought to get only five or six out of the wood elves.
He knew a moment’s pang of shame when the pair mounted horses and the elfess looked back to wave at him and his four companions. But then he recalled another time when he’d seen elves on horseback, a time when he’d watched in utter despair as two thousand elves had ridden away, and he turned his back on the southbound pair with a clean conscience.
“You didn’t help us at Iron Mountain,” he growled under his breath. “Did you now.”
“What’s that?” Thorvald asked him as he reached up to pat a horse’s nose. Besides Lodi, he was the only dwarf who wasn’t terrified of the huge beasts.
Lodi had decided to keep the five remaining horses. They would journey on foot in the same direction as the wizard and the elf had gone, sell the horses at the first Man town along the way, then strike out northeast through the wilds until they reached the safety of the mountains. And he would buy a crossbow or three, he reminded himself.
Lodi grunted. “Get a move on, lads. It’s an evil sign when men are getting to be as devious as bloody elves. We got a long way to walk before we get home, and I want a thousand tonnes of rock over my head before those foolish Man wizards start learning what a bad idea it is to wake a dragon.”
FINIS
OPERA VITA AETERNA
THE COLD AUTUMN day was slowly drawing to a close. The pallid sun was descending, its ineffective rays no longer sufficient to hold it up in the sky or to penetrate the northern winds that gathered strength with the whispering promise of the incipient dark. The first of the two moons was already visible high above the mountains. Soon Arbhadis, Night’s Mistress, would unveil herself as well.
The brother standing on watch duty at the abbey gate drew his cloak more closely about his shoulders, waiting for the bell that would summon him to Vespers and the warmth of the catholicon. While he was armed with a wooden staff, his only armor was the thick brown wool of the cloak. But this close to the inhuman lands, so near the elvenwood and the Waste of Kurs-magog, there were few brigands and thieves to trouble the stone walls that guarded the brotherhood of St. Dioscurus. One of the lesser orders, given formal recognition by the Sanctified Father only thirty years ago, the Dioscurines were not a mendicant order, but neither did they possess the wealth of the larger, more established brotherhoods.
Movement caught the monk’s eye, and he saw a solitary figure appear around the bend of the dirt roadway that passed by the monastery’s walls and led the occasional traveler to the nearby village of Mulvico. He was surprised. There were few who came this far north, here in the northeast corner of Sablema, but even fewer who were traveling in a southerly direction. There was little trade with the elves and none at all with the tribes of orcs and goblins that inhabited the Waste.
The traveler was no merchant, that was clear enough even at a distance. He lacked a mule or other beast of burden, and was walking too easily to be encumbered by any goods worth mentioning. Nor, as he came closer, did he appear to be a robber, since he wore no sword at his belt and there was no bow slung around his back. The brother already knew the traveler could not be a fellow Dioscurine, at least not one from the monastery. Except for him, keeping his lonely watch outside, all sixty of the order’s monks were already inside the walls, having recently eaten the second of their two daily meals permitted by the Rule of their founder.
The traveler came closer with each long stride. He was very tall, wearing a dark green cloak over a hooded robe, and he bore on his back a large leather pack that appeared to be half-empty. He carried nothing but a long, black walking stick that looked knotted, but turned out to be carved in an extravagantly ornate manner. His grey robe was brown from the knees down with the dust of the road, but it was woven from the sort of wool the monk would have expected to see a very rich man wearing.
The brother’s eyes narrowed and his hands tightened on his staff. But he did not step out from the gates he manned, nor did he call for assistance. Even if his suspicions about the tall traveler were correct, there was no reason to assume he intended any harm, or indeed harbored any desires beyond simply passing by.
And his suspicions were correct, he thought to himself as the traveler turned off the roadway in the direction of the monastery. But what was a solitary elf doing here on the road to Bithnya with winter fast approaching? And what could such an unexpected visitor possibly want with the brothers of St. Dioscurus?
He shrugged. It was rapidly becoming apparent that he would find out soon enough as the elf drew near to the gate.
“Peace be with you,” he bowed and greeted the elf in the humble manner he had been taught to show king or beggar. “Be welcome in our house, in the name of Our Immaculate and Ascended Lord.”
To his surprise, the elf bowed back to him.
“I come in peace. And I thank you for your welcome, priest of the Undead God. Have you a hostel in which a traveler weary may rest for the night? I have come a considerable distance, and I have coins I believe will be acceptable to your bishop.”
A little startled, the brother couldn’t keep himself from raising his eyebrows at being addressed in such an unusual manner, but he smiled politely and stepped back to invite the elf inside the monastery’s stone wa
lls.
“I am no priest, friend elf, merely a humble monk. This is the chapter house of the Ordo Sancti Dioscuri, and you need no coins here. I am Brother Sperarus. You have come all the way from Merithaim?”
He did not ask the traveler’s name. It was the foremost rule of the order to give succor to all who asked it.
The chapel bell began ringing out Vespers before the elf could answer. Sperarus closed the gates behind the elf. The thick wooden doors slammed shut with a boom loud enough to be heard over the bronze clangor of the nearby bells. Then he leaned his staff against the wall and picked up the thick wooden post and wrestled it into the metal supports attached to the backs of both doors, barring them against the night.
The elf had thrown back his hood and was rubbing at one of his pointed ears as the last echoes of the final bell faded away.
“Are you summoned to dine?”
“Prayer,” Sperarus replied. “But first I will take you to a chamber where you can wash and refresh yourself. I assume you have not eaten?”
“I have not.”
“The evening prayers do not take long. The abbot will come see that you are provided with something to eat. I fear you will find our fare to be on the simple side.”
“I should be grateful all the same, Brother Sperarus.”
They walked past gardens covered against the coming winter and fruit trees mostly denuded of their leaves, toward a low building made of stone with small windows covered by unpainted wooden shutters. It was barely more than an animal barn, but the smell of smoke from the fire inside promised warmth as well as welcome.
“This is the guesthouse. You may choose whatever empty room pleases you. We have no other guests today. Three of the older brothers have chambers there, as it is warmer than our cells in the main dormitory.”
He went to open the door, but the traveler stopped him. “Don’t you wish to know my name and my business?”
Sperarus smiled. “I do. But then, curiosity is one of my besetting sins. As you come in peace, you are welcome here, sir elf, by any name. Should the abbot see fit to inquire as to your business, I am sure he will do so when he comes to you.”