• • •
The tornado was taking up a good deal of space now, pressing farther in against the discriminating barrier. Once outside of the castle-to-be, Kaslo had to step well to the side of the roaring, swirling mass of air to put himself within Phalloon’s line of sight. But the thaumaturge, intent on stirring his elemental to even vaster energies, did not notice the op.
Kaslo held up a dusty bottle. The wizard’s gaze remained fixed on the whirlwind, his hands in frantic, though precise, motion, his mouth chanting a stream of syllables that were inaudible over the constant blast.
The barrier bent further, and Kaslo felt the first stirring of a breeze that lifted the hair on the back of his neck. He picked up a second bottle from the crate he had brought from the cellar, and held both above his head. Still Phalloon remained focused on his elemental’s management.
Kaslo tapped the neck of one bottle against another, heard a faint clink over the sound of the storm. Phalloon’s eyes flicked his way, though his hands and mouth continued their strict machinations. The op tapped the bottles together again, a little harder, the musical sound a little louder.
Phalloon shuddered, a man intent on his work who was resisting an irresistible distraction. Kaslo shrugged, flipped the bottle in one hand so that he was now holding it by its neck, then performed the same maneuver with the other one. He held them both aloft, and his face communicated a silent message to the thaumaturge: You think I won’t? Of course, I will.
A spasm went through the wizard. His hands moved faster, though without losing their precision; his mouth spat inaudible sounds at a frantic rate. The whirlwind not only roared, but keened. Kaslo heard in the voice of the wind a frustrated rage that dwarfed any ire he had ever known or seen.
Phalloon’s gaze was locked on him now, the irises again rimmed by fury’s white. Kaslo offered the wizard another shrug, spread his arms wide above his head, brought them together. The bottles smashed. A cascade of richly aromatic wine and shards of thin glass showered his head, trickled down his neck, and soaked the collar of his shirt.
Just before the impact, he had seen Phalloon’s mouth form a new word. The op could not hear it over the roar of the wind, but he had no doubt that the purple-faced man had shouted No-o-o-o-o!
Unfortunately for Phalloon, the long, drawn-out exclamation was not part of the spell that bound the elemental—a spell whose spoken component must be expressed just so, lest the enslaved and tormented air spirit break the thaumaturgical bonds in which Phalloon had netted it, and become free to do as its nature dictated.
The elemental’s nature dictated that it take full-bodied revenge on the wizard who had dragged it from its plane, humiliated it with fetters, and lashed it with ever-sharper agonies—at least, as such terms apply to a creature of spirit. It ceased to batter itself against the barrier and instead sped across the distance between it and Phalloon. The wizard raised his hands and tried to say something, but the whirlwind was upon him in a blink of an eye. He was lifted from his feet, turned end over end and swept skyward in a circular rush as the elemental stretched out the kinks that Phalloon’s spell had inflicted upon its substance. The last Kaslo saw of him was a vision of the man’s eyes, now wholly white. A moment later, a thin rattle of red drops struck the barrier, followed by a few morsels of flesh and one shattered bone. Then the whirlwind rose into the dark cloud above and tore it to shreds. Before Kaslo had crossed the distance to the castle’s basement door, the sky was clear.
He resisted the wine steward’s attempts to seize his hand and rain kisses on it. “Just put away the rest of the wine, then find yourself other duties,” he said.
When he arrived back in what had been Phalloon’s workroom, Obron was leaning against the edge of the window slit, the bone flute loose in his fingers. Kaslo took a stool over to where Obron stood. The wizard looked tired but appeared serviceable. “You’d better sit,” Kaslo said, then helped steady the wizard as he sank down onto the seat, shoulders slumped, head fallen forward. The op took the flute from his hand—it had a warm, greasy feel that raised the bile of revulsion in him—and put it on the bench.
“Now what?” he said.
Obron looked up. Vilzai’s Vivifier seemed to need a reapplication, Kaslo thought. The wizard flourished a fatigued hand. “First we bring in Phalloon’s trunk, then I consult Sholoff’s Extravaganza and finish the castle. After that, rest, consolidate, plan.”
“Should we not go to Indoberia, try to help?”
Obron shook his head. “We would be overwhelmed.”
“We sit here, safe, while the world collapses?”
“What makes you think,” the wizard said, his voice sounding as weary as he looked, “that we are safe?”
© 2014 by Matthew Hughes.
Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy. His sf novels are: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, The Commons, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Hespira, The Damned Busters, The Other, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. Formerly a journalist, he spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. His works have been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Awards. His web page is at matthewhughes.org.
The Armies of Elfland
Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick
It was the middle of the night when the mirrors came out of the elves. With a sound like the cushioned patter of an ice storm, the tiny mirrors fell to the ground, leaving a crust of glitter behind the marching elf army. They bled, of course, but the elven blood restored the dry land, undoing the effects of the drought, and moss emerged green from the ground in the troops’ wake.
The sight of the moss brought forth the drought-starved humans and their pathetic get to the mouths of their caves.
“Stay here!” the new father commanded. Not one of the children was his. But all the real fathers were dead, so they had no choice but to obey him or be beaten.
“Don’t go,” Agnes wanted to say. “Don’t trust them.” But Richard gently touched her lips to silence her. Richard was the oldest of the children, indeed almost an adult himself, and he did what he could to protect the others.
The adults fell on the damp moss, tearing it up by the double-handful like so much bread dough. They sucked the moisture from it and crammed its substance down their throats. Briefly, all seemed well. One of the new father’s wives was raising an arm to beckon the children down when the minute mirrors they had ingested suddenly expanded to ten, a hundred, a thousand times their original size. Jagged shards of mirror erupted from their flesh as horns, tusks, and spines. Blood fountained into the air and pooled on the ground, glimmering in the moonlight. The adults splashed through it, lurching grotesquely, writhing and howling in pain.
The children hid their eyes and turned away. The littlest ones cried.
Then, suddenly, there was silence. That was the hardest to bear of all.
But though the adults had ceased screaming, they did not fall. Brutally sharp glass fragments jutted from every inch of their bodies, holding them upright and rigid.
Nothing that was human remained of the adults. They had turned to crystal.
“We’ve got to bury them,” Agnes said firmly. “We can’t just leave them standing like that.”
“How?” Richard asked. “We can’t even touch them.”
The children had no shovels, but even with shovels they would have had a tough time trying to dig graves on the dry, barren beach. Where they stood had once been the shore of a small arm of the Pacific Ocean. But then the ocean had dried up and become a low, mountainous land of cliffs and sudden rifts, blanketed with dead fish and rotting seaweed. The sun had baked the wasteland that the elves had first created and then crossed as black and hard
as obsidian. There would be no burials there.
“We can throw stones,” Frederic said. He was the youngest of the children. He hadn’t spoken until he was three, which was over five years ago. When he did start to speak, however, his first words were, “Things are not as they once were.” Followed, after two days of intense thought, by, “In any case, they could be arranged better.” He came up with ideas nobody else could have.
So they did as he suggested, smashing the starlight-glittery figures from a distance until they were nothing but mounds of broken glass. Richard, who had read a lot back when there were books, said, “In ancient times, when men were warriors and carried spears, they buried their dead in mounds of rocks called cairns. This was an honorable form of burial. Even kings and queens were buried that way.” Then he turned to Agnes. “You’re good with words,” he said. “Please. Say a few words over the dead.”
Agnes took a deep breath. At last she said, “The adults were stupid.” Everybody nodded in agreement. “But the elves are cruel, and that’s worse.” Everybody nodded again. “I’m sick of them, and I’m sick of their war.” She raised her voice. “I want to have enough food to eat! All the food I want, every day of my life. I’m going to get it, too. I don’t know how. But I do know that I’m never going to be fooled by the elves or their mirrors or their green moss ever again!”
She spat on the ground, and everyone else followed suit.
“Amen,” she said.
She had no idea how futile her vow would prove.
• • •
During the Alien Invasions, as they were called before the world learned that the armies of Elfland came not from someplace unimaginably far away but from somewhere impossibly nearby, the children and their parents had been vacationing on a resort near Puget Sound. So shocked were the parents that at first they didn’t think to shield the children from their television sets. So the children saw the slaughter—what happened to the people who resisted the elves, and then what happened to the people who didn’t. When the elves came to Seattle, they left the television stations untouched, and courteously escorted the cameramen to Volunteer Park to broadcast their victory celebration to whoever might still be watching.
Under the guidance of their ghastly, beautiful queen, the invaders flayed their prisoners. This they did with exquisite skill, so that all were still alive when the work was done. Then they roasted them over coals. Troubadours wandered up and down the rows of scorched and screaming flesh, playing their harps in accompaniment. Elf-lords and elf-ladies formed quadrilles on the greensward in front of the band shell and danced entrancingly. Afterwards, they threw themselves down on the grass and ate heaping platters of roasted human flesh, while goblin servants poured foaming wine into sapphire goblets.
Then they torched the city.
• • •
The children understood cruelty far more intimately than did the adults, who had the army and the police and a hundred other social institutions to shield them from schoolyard beatings, casual theft, and having bugs and other vermin dropped into one’s food or mouth or clothing simply because somebody larger was bored. But they had never before seen such cruelty as this. What shocked them was not the deeds in themselves—they had imagined much worse—but that nobody took pleasure from them. These cruelties were not done with fiendish playground glee. There was no malice behind them, no glorying in the cruelty of what was done. Just a string of horrifying and senseless images running night and day on the television, until one day the transmitters stopped and there were no more.
That was when Frederick told the children that they had to go into the caves, and Richard led them all there. When the adults came to bring them back to the rental bungalows, Richard led the children deeper into the darkness and the adults followed. Thus it was that they few survived when every building on the island simultaneously burst into flames. It was cold in the caves, but at night the adults went out and foraged for food and blankets and fuel. Every now and then some of them didn’t return.
Months passed.
When the elves changed the weather and shrank the seas, the grasses and crops dried up. There was little to eat, and the adults weren’t anything like they used to be. Hunger made them unpredictable, violent, and impulsive.
It was no wonder, then, that the elves were able to catch them by surprise.
• • •
The adults were dead. Human history was over.
In the wake of the elves, grass returned, and then flowers. Trees rocketed to the sky. Some bore fruit. Agnes was roasting apples in the coals of a campfire one morning, when Richard sat down beside her, the sun bright in his golden-red hair. “We need weapons,” he said. “For when the elves return. I tried making a bow and arrows. But it’s just a toy. It wouldn’t kill anything larger than a sparrow.”
Agnes thought. “We can make spears, like the ones the cairn-people had. Spears are easy to use, and almost anything sharp would do for a head.”
Richard laughed with delight. “If you were older, I’d kiss you!” he cried, and hurried off to look for materials.
Leaving Agnes with the strangest feeling. Almost, she wished she was older. Almost, she wished he would kiss her.
That afternoon the elves returned and took them all prisoner.
This time, they killed nobody. Lean elves with long, stinger-tipped abdomens, like yellow-jackets, injected venom into the children’s bodies. They were immobilized and stacked like cordwood on a long wooden tray, then flown by winged elves back to their camp. There, they were dumped to the ground and dosed with antivenom. As they came back to life, the smaller children began to cry.
Not Agnes, however. Her body ached from being stung, but she was far more concerned about what was going to happen next. She looked around carefully. The elven camp was made up of brightly colored tents, far loftier than the ones people used for camping, with long silk pennons flying from their tips. They stood on a hilltop and the tents went on forever below them, like a field of flowers that had no end.
There was a groan behind Agnes, and somebody clutched her shoulder. With a shriek, she whirled about, only to discover Richard groggily staggering to his feet. “Oh!” she cried. “You scared me!”
A bamboo whip cut across her back.
It was just a single blow, but it was stunning in its effect. Agnes fell to her knees. Looking up through brimming tears, she saw an elegant and fearsomely beautiful grey-skinned elf in armor of ice lowering his whip. He made a gesture, lightly squeezing his own lips shut. Then he raised his eyebrows questioningly: Do you understand?
Richard started forward, fists clenched, as if to attack the elf, but Agnes flung her arms around him and held him back. When he twisted angrily toward her, she shook her head. Then, facing the elf, she nodded.
The elf made a sweeping gesture that encompassed all seven children. Gracefully, he gestured with his whip up a broad grassy avenue between the tents: Go that way.
They obeyed. Agnes went first, keeping her head down submissively, but secretly observing all that she could and filing it all away for future use. A half-step after her came Richard, head high and face stony. Next were the three middle children, Lexi, Latoya, and Marcus. Last of all came Frederic and Elsie, who were the youngest. If Agnes dawdled or started to glance behind herself, she felt a light flick of the grey elf’s whip on the back of her neck. It was just a reminder, but a potent one. Agnes hoped the littler children were being more circumspect than she, but she doubted very much that they were.
They were marched past a corral where centaurs fought with fists and hooves for the entertainment of their elven captors, and then by a knackery where unicorn carcasses were hung on meat hooks to cure. Under an arch made of two enormous ivory tusks they went and around a pyramid of wine barrels being assembled by red-bearded dwarves only half as tall as the hogsheads were. At last they came to their destination.
It was a tent as wide and bright as the sunset, whose billowing walls of silks and velvets burned
ember red and blood ochre, shot through with molten golds and scarlets that shimmered as if they came from a spectrum alien to human eyes. Banners and swags of orange and purple and black flew from the tops of the tent poles, kept permanently a-flutter by small playful zephyrs that smelled of cinnamon, cardamom, and hot peppers. She could not read the sigils on the flags, but she did not need to. By the psychic wind of terror and awe that gushed from the doorway to the tent, she felt, she sensed, she knew who lay within.
It could only be the dreadful Queen of Elfland.
At the castle-tent’s salient, the younger children were marched down a passage to the left, while Richard and Agnes were gestured inside. Almost, she cried after them. But the ice-armored elf raised his whip warningly. So Agnes made no sound, though she stretched out her arms toward the little ones as they disappeared from her ken.
• • •
Entering the tent was like stepping into another world. Gone were the somber reds and sullen crimsons, exchanged for sprightly greens and yellows and blues. Hummingbirds darted here and there. There was a tinkling of small bells, like wind chimes in a summer breeze. The sun shone brightly through the silk walls, making luminous the embroidered draperies showing scenes of war and feasting, of lovemaking and animal-hunting, and of things for which Agnes had no words. They wavered with every movement of the air, so that the figures seemed to be alive and in motion, pleading to be freed.
Their guard came to a stop. Overcome with dread, Agnes seized Richard’s hand. He squeezed hers back, reassuringly.
A gong sounded. The air shattered like the surface of a pond after a frog leaps into its center, and when the reverberations stopped and the air was still again, the elf-queen was simply there.
She reclined casually on the air just above a brocade-covered divan in the center of the tent. She wore a cream-colored man’s Brioni suit, cunningly retailored to fit her elegant body, an apricot silk blouse open to the navel, from which peeked a teardrop-shaped rock-crystal pendant, and no shoes. Her skin was the color of polished bronze, with hints of verdigris and subtle green depths. Her cheekbones were high and sharp. Her eyes were set at an angle, and they flashed jungle-green, an emerald effulgence from a star that did not shine in the night sky of this world. Unbidden, a name popped into Agnes’s mind: Melisaundre.
Lightspeed Issue 46 Page 12