It seemed his people had good reason to want the elves locked away and forgotten. Suddenly he understood why nobody had broken open the Vincularium in so many centuries-because they didn’t want to learn the secrets it held.
Chapter Eighty-three
Perhaps discomfited by the story she’d told them, Aethil took her leave of them for a while. She went and sat with a group of children struggling over a history lesson, and coached them through the hard words and the complicated tenses of elfin writing. Malden saw how much love and reverence even these children showed their queen, and he thought he finally understood her place in elfin society. She gave the workers something to believe in, an emblem of their traditions and heritage. The Hieromagus must find her very useful, he thought, for keeping the workers in line. So then why, he pondered, had he gone to the trouble of making her fall in love with Slag, which could only discredit her with these people?
Speaking of the dwarf, Malden looked around and saw him climbing on a high bookshelf. A ladder had been mounted on the wall for this purpose. Slag drew one slim volume off a top shelf, then scrambled down to floor level and started paging through it. Apparently he didn’t find what he was looking for, because he started to climb back up again.
Cythera grabbed the hem of his robe and pulled him back down. “We need to make a plan,” she said. “This tour is almost over. We’ll never have a chance like this again.”
“You mean to make a run for it now,” Malden said, nodding. “We’ll need a diversion. Slag, you could grab one of the children and threaten to-”
“Absolutely not!” Cythera cried out.
Aethil looked up from the lesson to study the three of them with questioning eyes. Cythera made a great show of smiling and bowing before Slag, as a proper shieldmaiden should.
When they were unobserved again, she went on. “I won’t allow that, Malden. These children are innocents. Don’t you believe in anything?”
“Not if it keeps me imprisoned in this pretty cage,” he told her.
“Lad, lass, calm yourselves. We can’t make a break for it now anyway. Where would we go?”
“The escape shaft. The one Balint opened up for us,” Malden insisted.
The dwarf shook his head. “Forget it, lad. That’s clear on the other fucking side of the Vincularium. Assuming we even made it back to the central shaft, I could lead you there, aye, but you saw those worm tunnels the elves have made. They’d be there waiting for us. No, we need a better plan than just legging it. I still think if we work on yon queen of peons, we can convince her to make a case for us, and get us released. She’ll do anything I-”
He stopped speaking because Aethil had finished her lesson and was coming toward them. “I’m so sorry for that,” she said. “You’ve been so patient, waiting for me. But now, let us return to our tour. I have something very important to show you.”
“Of course, your highness,” Cythera said.
“Sir Croy?” Aethil said. “Now what are you doing up there?”
The dwarf had returned to the bookshelves. He was leaning far out across the top shelf, stretching his arm to reach a book that was just too far away.
“What? I just-”
His fingers snagged the book he wanted and sent it flopping down to the floor. Its spine broke instantly and half its pages turned to silvery flakes.
“Shit-sucking cock bollocks!” the dwarf shouted.
Suddenly every elfin child in the library was staring at him. Slag’s face went bright red and he hurriedly climbed back down.
Aethil had picked up the book he’d knocked out of its place. Carefully, she tucked the loose pages-those that hadn’t turned to dust as she touched them-back inside the loose covers. “What did you want this one for?” she asked.
“It’s a book the dwarves thought didn’t exist anymore!” Slag exclaimed. He reached for it, but Aethil held it out of his grasp. “I can’t believe I found it!”
“A dwarven book? Yes, I can recognize a few of these runes, though not many.” Aethil frowned. “But, Sir Croy, what would a human want with such a thing?”
Slag’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened but no words came out.
What would a human want with a dwarven book?
Malden, never at a loss for a quick cover story, raced to the rescue. “Sir Croy is a man of great learning. He’s studied the lore of all the races of Skrae,” he said. “Even those treacherous cutthroats, the dwarves.”
“Fucking bastards, them,” Slag agreed. “Never trust a dwarf, I always say.”
“I didn’t even know we had any of these,” Aethil said, looking down at the book. “I suppose it must have been left behind when the dwarves abandoned this place. It is of interest to you?”
Slag nodded carefully. “Of-some-small academic interest only, but-”
“Then you shall have it, as my gift,” Aethil said. She knelt down and handed it to Slag. “Perhaps you’ll think of something you can give me, in return.” The look on her face left no doubt in Malden’s mind what she hoped her present would be. “But read it later. We really should go see the hall of the ancients now.”
“What’s there?” Malden asked.
Aethil smiled. “Our ancestors. As promised. I want you to meet them.”
Chapter Eighty-four
Aethil led them down a long series of curving tunnels that ended in an irregular cavern-no dwarven hall, this, but a natural cave. Torches standing in cressets here and there lit the place near as bright as day. Stalactites hung down from the high ceiling, reminding Malden of the spires of Ness, but inverted and hung from a stony sky. He touched one as they passed and felt its wet, stony surface. “How do they not fall?” he asked, imagining how little he would like to be underneath one when it did.
“No one knows that,” Aethil told him, “nor why they grew like this in the first place. I’ve heard a theory, though I give it little credence, that these are the roots of some enormous tree high above us. Though how a tree’s roots should come to be made of stone I cannot say.”
Once the floor must have been equally covered in stalagmites, but many of these had been cut down to make a walkway-the floor of the cave would have been impassible otherwise. A trail of them like stepping-stones ran from one end of the cave to the other. They looked a great deal like tree stumps, which got Malden thinking. “Trees. They say the elves loved their trees, when they lived above the ground.”
Aethil’s face grew wistful for a moment. “I’ve read about trees. They do sound lovely. I’d like to see one… but of course, that can never be.”
“They’re… even lovelier than you can imagine,” Cythera said. She looked at Malden with wide eyes, and gave him a barely perceptible nod. “The way they are-so-green. And tall.” She shook her head and looked to the thief. “Words fail me, I-”
“They shimmer,” he said, catching on. “In the summertime, when they are cloaked in verdant leaves, every gust of breeze that comes by makes them shiver. The leaves rustle together until it sounds as if they whisper secrets amongst themselves. The shade they make is dappled, and cool, and a blessing on a hot day. Ah, but they save their best beauty for the days of autumn, when the air grows crisp, and they turn all the colors of fire. A thousand trees in serried ranks, orange and yellow and red, shimmering like a sea aflame, the trunks bending in the wind, the leaves falling like a rain of gold
… ’Tis a glory to see.”
Aethil’s face went completely blank as she listened to him. She didn’t move a muscle as his description went on. He thought he had touched something in her, something deep in her ancestral memory.
Then she recovered herself and looked down at her hands with sad eyes. “Forgive me. I was lost there for a moment.” She laughed prettily. “You fill my head with fancies! Almost you make me think I’d like to go up to the surface, just to see all the things I’ve read about.”
“The seal that locked your people away has been breached. The way is open, for one who is not afraid of revenants
,” Cythera pointed out. “You could just go up there to the entrance hall and peek out. There are trees not a hundred yards from where we came in.”
Aethil shook her head, her copper curls dancing in the torchlight. “I’ll thank you to stop tempting me now. We have much to see today, and tomorrow-tomorrow things will be different. Come.”
Malden opened his mouth to speak again, to describe the feel of wind on one’s face, the warmth of the sun, the serene majesty of clouds-but Cythera pinched his arm, hard, and he realized that this was not the time to push.
The four of them passed through the cave and came to a stone arch at its end. There, a pair of revenants stood guard. They stirred when the humans approached, but Aethil spoke soothing words and they stood down.
Beyond the arch was a wide mezzanine that looked down into a vast hall of dwarven work, with marble floor and walls and countless columns holding up a vaulted ceiling. The walls below them were pockmarked, however, with hundreds of narrow tunnel mouths. Strangely, the tunnels could not be reached from the floor-anyone seeking to use them would have to scale the smooth marble blocks, which even for Malden would be a challenge. The vast chamber was empty, the distant floor looking scoured clean.
“I’ve shown you how our lives begin,” Aethil said, her voice quite serious and even reverent. “Now you’ll learn how they end. Or rather, how they are transformed, for in a very real way, we elves are immortal. When our bodies reach a certain age, when they slow down and are beset by aches and pains, we come to stand here and join with the ancestors. It is a profound event in our lives, and one we take with utter solemnity. What I am about to do is mild sacrilege, honestly, but it’s important you see this.”
A large brass bell with a handle hung from a hook near the door. Aethil took it down, then holding it carefully, rang it once, loud and clearly. Then she put it back on the hook.
“Nothing is lost,” she said. “Our memories, our souls, join with those of all our ancestors here. Our bodies become empty husks but they walk still, and are given simple tasks to perform. Like guarding the arch back there.”
“You’re talking about the revenants,” Cythera said.
“Yes. That is how our bodies become immortal. But for our souls, a far better future awaits.”
Malden heard a faint rushing sound, like water flowing through pipes. He stared down into the marble hall, wondering what horror he was about to witness.
He did not have to wait long.
Whitish fluid sluiced down out of one of the tunnel mouths, then another. Soon, from every conduit the viscous stuff poured in a torrent. It splashed and sloshed as it hit the marble floor, then gathered in a pool that rose to fill the open space. As Malden watched, repulsed, it grew thicker and climbed toward them, bits of its substance shooting forth like tendrils to reach ever higher.
In that white pool, faces loomed toward them, pressing against the skin that formed over the fluid. Angular, beautiful faces-the faces of elves. There were thousands of them, and they lifted toward Aethil, smiling, laughing silently. Beckoning.
Aethil took a step back from the edge of the mezzanine. Her face flushed and she turned her eyes away. “Even now, I feel the desire to enter the mass,” she said. “Though my time has not come. It is so hard to resist. How I long to see my mother’s face for the first time, and to see again friends I’ve loved who have gone on… Sir Croy, please, take my hands. Hold me to this place, so that I am not tempted to leap into my destiny too soon!”
“Bloody fuck,” Slag said, forgetting that he was trying not to swear. He grabbed the elfin queen to hold her back. “This is your-”
“The ancestral mass,” she confirmed. “The life force of every Elder who ever lived, every one of us who perished-their memories, their dreams, their thoughts, made tangible. It preserves our history. It sustains us-it dug the tunnels you’ve seen, and it taught us how to grow mushrooms and harvest the meat and milk of the cave beetles. In the early days it went so far as to gather food for us, and tend to us when we were sick.”
Malden could only sneer in horror at the thought of that stuff touching him, that gooey, dreadful substance. It looked soft in the way dead things are soft, pale in the way corpses are pale. The curdled souls of millions of dead elves, all of them swirled together in a shapeless accretion. It lived, after a fashion, but only in a fashion that made him want to kill it. Though how anyone-even Morget-would go about destroying something so large and so lacking in qualities, Malden could not imagine.
“Without it, we would have perished centuries ago,” Aethil said. She sounded like a woman looking in awe into a majestic canyon, or a mother watching her baby take its first steps. She loved the damned thing, he thought. She truly loved it, because it wasn’t just some pile of memories. It was her family-her legacy and her loved ones, all at once.
Malden tried to see it through her eyes. He tried to understand what the elves must think of this thing, this slimy savior. He couldn’t do it.
He just wanted it to die.
The psychic effect of the mass didn’t just effect Aethil. Cythera reeled, too, and pressed her hands to either side of her head. She seemed desperate to get away, edging slowly back toward the archway-if the mass attracted Aethil, it repelled Cythera equally. Malden supposed it must know of the magic in her skin, or perhaps it had this effect on any daughter of a witch. He grabbed her arm to help steady her and she met his eyes. “You recognize it, from his-from the barbarian’s-from the description,” she gasped.
“Aye,” Malden whispered.
It was Morget’s demon, all right. Though a thousand times bigger than the barbarian had thought.
Pieces of the mass-mere drops of its substance-splashed up onto the mezzanine. Some were ten feet across. They drew themselves up into amorphous blobs, the faces under their skin crowding toward Aethil, beseeching with her. Clearly the mass could split off small parts of itself to perform various tasks. One of those pieces must have been the thing Morget fought on the eastern slope of the Whitewall Mountains.
“We must go,” Aethil insisted. “Please, lead me away. I cannot seem to take a step on my own.”
The three of them helped propel her back through the archway and into the cave of stalactites beyond. Once out of the hall of ancients she seemed to recover quickly. She looked to them all with grateful eyes.
“You needed to see that,” she said softly. “You needed to see how beautiful the ancestral mass is.”
“For fuck’s sake why?” Slag demanded.
Aethil looked away. “It has been decided. Tomorrow you-all of you-will be joining it. It’s a privilege beyond compare. The first humans to enter the mass! You should welcome this, with happy countenance. Though I’ll admit, I’ll miss you all when you’re gone.”
Chapter Eighty-five
“Heave!” Balint called. Croy and Morget hauled on the ropes they held, their backs straining. Croy’s arms felt as numb as wood, but still he pulled. “Heave!”
The barrels shifted a foot farther up the ramp.
They were a quarter of the way up, with a good hundred feet of incline to go.
Each of the barrels was too heavy for the knight or the barbarian to carry themselves, and the five of them together made an immense weight. They could be turned on their sides and rolled across flat stretches of floor, but getting them up to higher levels was beyond human strength.
“Heave!”
Luckily Balint had a pulley in her pack, and enough rope to make a block and tackle. Croy understood little of how that actually helped-something to do with multiplying the force involved, the dwarf had said. He hadn’t really been listening. What he did know was that the barrels were moving, inching their way up a long ramp to the top level of the Vincularium.
“Heave!”
Of course, once the humans and the dwarf did get up there, the revenants would certainly come to kill them. Croy and Morget would have all the grim work they could handle, fighting off the undead elves long enough to get the b
arrels into place.
He didn’t worry about that. He kept all his attention on his rope. It helped if he thought there was an elf in a noose on the other end.
“Heave!”
“Useless dwarf, be still!” Morget shouted. “You aren’t helping.”
Up on top of the barrels, Balint looked down at the barbarian with a hurt expression. “If you don’t pull at the same time, we run the risk of breaking the rope. At which point the barrels will slide all the way back down-and hopefully, roll right over your bloody big foot in the process,” she said. “Now, together, heave!”
Croy pressed his boots hard against the surface of the ramp and pulled for all he was worth.
“I don’t understand why we’re doing this at all,” Morget said. “Yes, yes, it’s a powerful weapon. More powerful than anything I’ve seen before, you say. But my sword and my axe are good weapons, too. Good enough, if you ask me.”
“Heave! And what of your demons, friend? What of those creeping birdshits you came to slay? You’ve seen how hard it is to kill them with your pig-sticker and your wood-chopper. Wouldn’t you prefer to kill them all in one stroke? Heave!”
Morget grunted explosively, but he heaved.
“Tell me again, then, why this will work,” he insisted.
Balint sighed dramatically. “Heave!” Her knocker tapped away at the top of one barrel as if trying to guess what was inside. “The entire Vincularium is held up by three massive columns. Heave! It’s an elegant design, a real joy to look at, but it’s about as vulnerable as a maidenhead when the fleet comes in. Heave! It’s like a three-legged stool. Not much use if you- heave! — remove one leg. Shatter one of those columns, just one, and-”
“And the whole thing crashes down,” Morget said.
“Heave!”
Croy’s back burned with the effort, but he heaved.
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