Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (36 page)

“But the whole place is yours, I thought,” Gelert said.

The Elf-King looked at Gelert in sudden surprise. Then he laughed. “Some parts of it more than others. That place, that side of the mountain, has its own history. No matter what they told you, there 
was
 a garden—though few Alfen like to think about it. My people’s first great downfall happened there.” He gave Lee a wry look. “It may have established an archetype. Anyway, let’s get away first. There’ll be a little time to tell you the tale: not much, for they’ve forced my hand.”

“Do we still need to go all the way up there?”

“No,” the Elf-King said, though as he looked up and over his shoulder, it was plain that he would have liked to. “The power of my ancestor is in this for me.” He gripped the stone. “This was part of the old garden, where he invested so much of his strength—the right to which passes to me. With 
this
, we can go from here, drug or no drug; and we’ll go a way they won’t think we’ll go.” He briefly looked concerned. “I saw what Dierrich did to the weather. I’m sorry to have to take you back into the cold, but it’s a way they won’t expect, and it’ll buy us some time. Are you willing?”

Gelert looked up in the direction of the castle, around the shoulder of the mountain. Lee followed his glance, and saw the lights lifting into the sky. “Willing or not, we’d better go.”

The Elf-King cupped both hands around the little stone, closed his eyes. The air off to one side rippled obscurely: not a big opening, not very steady-looking. “Go,” he said.

Gelert wasted no time in going through the shimmer in the air. The Elf-King went after him, vanishing almost entirely, holding out a hand to Lee through the shimmer. She took it, and vanished after him—

—into the dark again. It was as well that she had been warned about the cold. Maybe it was the contrast with the warmer air on the mountainside, maybe it was her body’s reaction to being so cold again after nearly dying of it earlier; but the bitter stillness of the air stung her all over, and burnt Lee’s face like cold fire.

Gelert was shaking his head again, wincing with the pain in his ears. “I’m sorry,” the Elf-King said. “We won’t stay here a moment longer than we must: just long enough for our trail to go cold.”

“
That
 shouldn’t take long,” Lee said, hugging herself again, looking up and around her. They stood in a vast pale waste of snow, utterly still, utterly quiet. Just the little dry squeak made by Lee’s shifting her stance on the snow seemed terribly loud. And the terror was a subtle thing, creeping up in the back of her mind, a sense that she shouldn’t make sound, shouldn’t attract attention, for something, someone awful was watching—

Gelert was looking up into that utterly black and crystalline sky at the stars there. The constellations were strangely altered, and the aurora danced high in that sky, great green and violet curtains, hissing softly. As they started to walk, that hiss was the only sound besides the squeak of their footsteps in the snow, and the strange small tinkling sounds each exhalation made in the terrible cold of the air. “Is this where I think it is?” Gelert said.

“Midgarth,” the Elf-King said. “Yes.” He looked around him as if trying to find a landmark. Lee thought that would be a good trick, in this landscape as bald as an egg.

“Over that way,” he said softly. “I know what you’re feeling. That sense of watching… But it’s usually spurious. We’re not likely to attract any attention at the moment. The Battle hasn’t started yet, and when it does, it’ll be far south of here.”

If Lee hadn’t been shivering already, she would have started then. This would be the middle of the Fimbulwinter—absolutely the last time any but the most foolhardy tourist would want to visit Midgarth. All those of its normal inhabitants who didn’t desire to take their chances fighting at the side of the Gods were elsewhere in the worlds now, on work permits, or lying on the beaches of Huichtilopochtli or Tierra, soaking up the rays and giving thanks for worldgating technology.

“We’re probably lucky that all the worlds aren’t like this,” the Elf-King said, beginning to walk. As he went, he turned and looked over his shoulder, and saw Lee shivering, and without breaking stride, took off his jacket and gave it to her. “But something went wrong with Midgarth’s entropy patterning when the core of the sheaf rotated. So it keeps repeating and repeating this cycle…”

“While this may be the beginning of the story,” Gelert said, “maybe it’s a little too 
far
 toward the beginning?”

“Maybe it is. But then you know at least half the story already. I know you do because Hagen knew you did. And I have, or had, other operatives in his organization, tapping his comms and feeding me information about his doings, besides the one that Dierrich’s people killed.”

“Omren dil’Sorden,” Lee said softly, as she slipped the Elf-King’s jacket around her.

The Elf-King nodded. “No one bids for fairy gold at a price as low as that big contract he found out about,” he said, “unless they know the price is about to fall. And the way that ExTel, and the various other multinationals and supranationals colluding with it, know that the price will fall, is that they have an invasion scheduled for eighteen months from now. They will enter Alfheim by force, and—” He broke off, rubbing his eyes briefly. “There are aspects of this I still find hard to discuss. They will at the very least overthrow our government and take control of fairy gold production themselves. But let that wait for a moment. Dierrich and her party knew about the multinationals’ plan for a while, but they never took it seriously. Mostly they amused themselves with hunting down Alfen double agents working in the outworlds, or Alfen whose loyalties they find questionable, even doubtful. They’ve killed many innocents in this way—and drawn to themselves exactly the attention they were hoping to avoid.”

“The Interpol report,” Gelert said.

“Yes.”

“So Hagen is involved with this invasion plan,” Lee said, “and when it became plain that dil’Sorden had probably realized what that buy meant, Hagen had him killed.”

“No, that wouldn’t have been his idea. I think it more likely to have been Dierrich’s order, and the Alfen who hired the triggerman, almost certainly, is Dierrich’s deputy Mevel dil’Amarens.”

“I think Gelert and I would like to interview this person,” Lee said.

“I think you must achieve another state of existence to do so,” the Elf-King said, “since he was among the fifteen or so of Dierrich’s creatures whom I’ve just killed.”

Lee and Gelert looked at each other, and Gelert nodded. “I Scented him up there, too,” Gelert said. “One more piece of information that the DA will be glad to have… but Lee, did you record that?”

Lee shook her head. “I don’t suppose we could get you to testify at the trial?” she said.

The Elf-King gave her a thoughtful look, and nodded. “It will doubtless mean other disclosures,” he said, “such as the names of my deep-cover people in the LAPD, who fed the information about your forensic sweeps to me. But if I live through the next few days—yes, I’ll do that for you gladly.”

If any of us live through the next few days
, Lee Saw him think. She shivered again, feeling more strongly the effect of the darkness about her, and the horror. Lee had always had an idle idea that the gigantic cyclic migrations from Midgarth had more to do with the weather than anything else. Now, though, she saw how very wrong she’d been. People in microcultures all over the Worlds dealt with the cold without too much trouble; some of them even liked it. But this leaden, deadly darkness, and the fear lurking away high in it, were something she hadn’t reckoned with. Out there the forces of Night and Hatred were moving; for this little while, this world was their own, and what life or light they found, they would stamp out without mercy. Lee almost wished she didn’t have to breathe out. She felt as if even that slight exhalation of warmth might attract the attention of something she emphatically did not want to see her.

Glancing up at that black sky, for once she had no desire to See it any better. The stars up there were set in no friendly patterns. They were merely cold eyes for something that viewed her only with scorn, the pitiful devotee of a Power that had no power here, at least in this time—not until the Winter ended in devastation, and the rising of the new-made Sun over a world broken but reborn. But that wouldn’t be for years yet, as this world reckoned time. Right now the dark Powers were in the full of their strength, and held this world in Their hands—

Enough time for our trail to go cold
, the Elf-King had said. Lee wondered exactly how much longer that was going to take. The wind was beginning to rise, now, and it sounded like the howling of wolves; or of one wolf, huge, hungry, that waited to eat the Sun.

“We’re close,” the Elf-King said. “At any rate, Dierrich’s party, and some other parties in Alfheim who would prefer some other Laurin, all think if they deal with the multinationals now, they’ll be safe. But they’re blind to the cause of the problem. Genuinely blind in some cases—willfully blind in others. Dierrich fell into that second category, and so was as dangerous to our world by herself as all the others put together. She really thought that if she derailed the plans that ExTel and their many friends in the outworlds had built so far, they wouldn’t come back and try again. She thought they were just ephemerals, unable to hold a thought for more than a year at a time.”

His expression was grim. “But sooner or later, their corporate descendants would come back and try the same thing again; more violently, more conclusively. Because the symptom persists—the fact that will bring them back again and again. The transmission speed of fairy gold in Alfheim is many times what it is in the outworlds. What they don’t realize is that this is because Alfheim is the heart of the sheaf.”

Lee looked at him in the darkness. “You mentioned that before. What sheaf?”

“The sheaf of eleven universes of which Earth and all the others are part.”

Gelert gave the Elf-King an incredulous look as he paced along beside him. “Excuse me. 
Eleven
?”

“There are four more that you haven’t found yet,” the Laurin said. “This wasn’t something we felt we needed to mention to the other universes, as it might have provoked awkward questions—such as, how did 
we
 know? The answers, however roundabout, would have led those in other universes to the realization that whoever controls the central universe of the sheaf exerts control over all the others. And that might have had unfortunate results.”

Lee and Gelert could do nothing but stare at each other.

“There,” the Elf-King said, and pointed. “Finally.”

Just rearing itself above the snow line, now, Lee could see something jutting up: a ring of stones, far bigger than the one she’d seen in Alfheim. “A transit ring?” Gelert said.

“Not a mechanical one. No particle accelerators: or at least, none of the built kind. It’ll serve our purpose, anyway. This gate swings only one way, and I can close it after us. Or jam it shut, which means that anyone trying to come after us will have to go the long way around through three other universes, the way they’re aligned at the moment, to come at us.”

He broke into a trot, and Lee went after him eagerly enough; it was a way to stay warm…and she was eager to get out of here. Gelert trotted alongside her, glancing from side to side as he went “They say this is really nice in the summer,” he said.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Lee said. The cold was beginning to bite hard into Lee again, and she was glad to get to the ring of stones, though the evil look of them dismayed her. They were black, roughhewn, ruinous; the way they leaned inward gave them a terrible look of silent threat, as if they wanted to fall and crush whatever walked among them. But the Elf-King walked into the circle as calmly as Lee might walk into her own living room, and stood there looking around him as casually.

When did I last think about my living room?
 Lee thought, as she went in among the stones, glancing at them mistrustfully. Right now she would have given anything to be sitting there on the sofa, nice and warm, with her feet tucked up underneath her, watching something mindless… or even just the news. But that thought immediately brought up the image of yellow sodium-vapor lights illuminating black-and-whites, and a sheeted corpse lying near Eighteenth and Wilshire. 
No
, she thought. 
For his
 
sake, I’ll see this through—

She went to stand beside the Laurin; Gelert joined her. The Elf-King had the stone from the “garden” in his fist again, and was standing there gazing down at the snow, a concentrating look. “I know a quiet spot where we’re going,” he said. “You don’t have to move. Just stand still and let the effect pass.”

Lee set her teeth as the cold, dark world around her shimmered and wobbled, as the cobweb feeling swept over her body and rooted in her bones for a long time, too long. She felt as if she was being thrown in the air like a ball, while outside her the world tumbled and tore itself to pieces in a way of which her Sight could make nothing, a distortion more upsetting than any mere gate-complex hula she’d ever experienced. After a moment everything settled down, and she opened her eyes, which she’d shut in self-defense. It was hot, incredibly hot; but that was probably only by contrast with the place they’d just come from.

And she and Gelert and the Elf-King were standing in a little triangular park with two streets running along either side of it. There were wheeled vehicles, some parked on either side of the little triangle of concrete and grass: others drove by on the ground, bright yellow. 
Taxis?
 Lee thought. 
New
 
York?

It was New York. But it wasn’t. Lee looked around her, trying to See the difference. The street signs on the pole at the nearest corner said Avenue Of The Americas and 12th Street; but the feel of the street on which she stood was so alien and different from that of the New York where she and Gelert had been not three weeks ago that Lee felt like she might as well have been on Mars. “This isn’t Earth,” Lee said.