Stealing the Elf-King''s Roses

  “Thank you,” Lee said. “I appreciate it very much.” Dil’Hemrev went off, and for a moment or so Lee just stood there in the middle of the room, looking at the commwall and savoring the moment. She actually grinned. About this, at least, Matt was right, she thought. This was worth coming for. She sat down at the desk, where even the chair was comfortable, and got to work.

  *

  Two hours or so later, though, Lee wasn’t so happy anymore, and by lunchtime, she was less happy still.

  The database the Alfen had assembled for her contained literally hundreds of cases, dating back some twenty years—a huge mass of data Lee spent the initial hour or so sorting in various ways to examine the cases for any correlations that would spring out quickly. The problem, as she discovered fairly quickly, was that the forensics in all these cases were “dry”; they came without any analysis of the events, at least none that Lee could find. At first she thought perhaps this was simply because she hadn’t dug deep enough, or had scanned the data using insufficiently specific concepts or keywords. But as hour added itself to hour, it became plain to Lee that if analysis had been done at all, it hadn’t been included in the material she’d been given. What she had here was the equivalent of about twenty years’ worth of “cold cases,” some of them right down in the bottom of the deep freeze, as coldness went. And while the forensic data seemed complete enough on the surface, if Lee or anyone else had wanted to actually go to any of the scenes and look for further data, so much time had passed on nearly all of them that there was now next to no hope of finding anything else useful, no matter how skillful the physical or psychoforensicist might be.

  So they’ve left me with a huge mass of information, but no conclusions drawn about it by their own people, Lee thought. And the majority of the cases otherwise so old that, though bureaucratically they’re ‘cold,’ the reality of it is that they’re closed without resolution or even final assessment. This does not exactly strike me as ‘cooperation.’ She leaned back in her chair and looked at the big commwall, on which the list of pertinent files, hundreds of them, stared back at her.

  Unless I’m coming at this from the wrong direction and missing some kind of cultural difference that’s obvious to them and not to me. After all, why would Alfen necessarily perceive the crime the same way we do? And we’re not always perfect in the way we classify murder, either. She thought briefly of one police force in a neighboring state, some years back, which without a second thought had for many years classified people murdered in its jurisdiction as “male victim,” “female victim,” and “prostitute.” Is it possible that Alfen who’re murdered become ‘nonpeople’ in some way? Or am I just giving them too much benefit of the doubt, and is this just straightforward obfuscation?

  She made a wry face. Too soon to tell. Let’s break for lunch.

  Lee spent a little while working out how to direct the local computer system to dump all the murder files to her pad; and while it was doing that, said to the commwall, “Call Gelert reh’Mechren, please; a temporary code at the Exchequer.”

  A few seconds later Gelert glanced up at her from a low table where his own pad and some printouts and other documentation were lying. “Thought I might hear from you around now,” he said. “The tourist board left a message with me for you.”

  “The tourist board?” Lee said. “They actually have one? Must be the quietest office in town.”

  Gelert grinned, an expression that suggested he shared her opinion, but wasn’t going to say so in the clear. “Tomorrow afternoon, if the weather’s good, they’ll send someone around to show us the way up to the ‘Rose Garden.’ Seems there are some nice rock formations up there. Did you bring hiking shoes?”

  “I’ve got some cross trainers that’ll do all right.”

  “Fine. The guy will stop by the residence tower at fourteen or so. Ready for lunch now?”

  “Extremely. I’ll see you back there shortly.”

  The wall flicked back to the file view. Lee killed her pad’s connection to it, packed it up, and spent a few moments looking, not at the commwall, but at the view of the mountain wall behind the building. She’d spent the whole morning with her back turned to it on purpose, for even viewed sidelong, the rugged splendor of it drew her to spend minutes on end gazing at it. It was as if it had a message for her, one it was being prevented from communicating. Now, just for a few minutes, she bent her attention on the mountain and called for the Sight.

  It wouldn’t come.

  Lee nodded, just slightly. Something was specifically blocking her. All right, she thought as she got up and headed for the door. Fine. We’ll see what happens tomorrow…

  She spent the rest of that afternoon, and all the morning of the next day, right through noontime, sifting through the Alfen homicidal mortality data for any sign that she was missing something obvious. If she was going to go knocking on Dierrich dil’Estenv’s door with accusations of continued noncooperation by ExAff, she wanted to be very sure she was in the right before she did it. But all her work left her exactly where she’d been the previous day—still lacking any trace in the record of any local analysis of the murders. It’s as if they wanted to ignore them, she thought, pushing back from her desk around thirteen. Is the very concept that an Elf can be murdered somehow embarrassing to them, I wonder? If it is, maybe dil’Estenv can suggest another tack I might take to get what I need.

  She headed back to the residence tower under a perfectly cloudless sky. The weather here seemed to get settled, the way it did at home in LA, and stay fair and surprisingly warm for prolonged periods in the summer; the way it had been behaving, it was hard to believe that this was still an alpine landscape, and would be deep in snow come January, But I have a feeling we’re unlikely to see ski season here, she thought as she climbed the tower stairs toward her and Gelert’s room. Or the far side of next week, for that matter. She’d managed a few quiet words with Sal in the midst of the clatter and stir of the group’s buffet breakfast that morning—just long enough for him to tell her what she’d been afraid of:

  “Their new books are. clean, Lee. We’re going to have to go home empty handed, unless…”

  Unless. She went in and had a quick lunch with Gelert, and it was just as well it was quick, for she’d hardly had time to change and finish the hasty sandwich she’d thrown together at the sideboard before someone knocked at the door. Gelert went to speak it open.

  There stood a tall, fair, freckled, somewhat sunburnt Alfen in casual climbing clothes, shorts, and a short-sleeved tunic and jacket, and high socks and climbing boots. He looked like any weekend hiker—except that the weekend hikers with whom Lee was acquainted rarely looked so much as if Michelangelo had carved them. “I’m Earmen dil’Undevhain,” the Alfen said. “I am told you are interested in climbing up to Istelin’ru Semivh this afternoon?”

  He doesn’t even have knobby knees. Lee thought. It’s just not fair. “That’s right,” Lee said.

  “We should get started, then,” dil’Undevhain said. “It is somewhat late already; but we have just enough time to get up there and back before dark.”

  “Two minutes,” Lee said, and went to get her jacket. Interesting, she said privately to Gelert. This is the first Alfen I’ve heard since we got here, except in the Miraha , who isn’t perfectly fluent in English. Can it be that for a change we’re meeting someone who isn’t associated with one of the Alfen security services…?

  It’d make an interesting change, Gelert said. Meanwhile at least we get a nice afternoon out in the air. But Lee—

  Hmm?

  Stay away from the edges of cliffs. You never can tell…

  *

  The walk up to Istelin’ru Semivh—if it could be called that, when it was eighty percent a climb up a thirty-percent incline—took nearly two hours. Dil’Undevhain was a pleasant enough guide, talking with apparent enjoyment about the terrain, the plant and animal life, and the views. But he set a pace that Lee had some trouble matching, even though she
often enough went hiking in the Angeles National Forest in her spare time. Damned if I’m going to let him see that I’m having trouble, though!

  Their path took them eastward around the foot of the mountain wall that loomed behind Aien Mhariseth, over a small rubble-strewn yoke between it and a lesser peak farther east, then diagonally up the mountain’s southern face. “Not a tall mountain,” dil’Undevhain said; “only eight hundred meters. But the view near the summit is quite wonderful.”

  It had better be, Gelert said silently. My paws are going to be in shreds after this. Lee felt for him, for the scree that had tumbled down the mountain to define most of the paths they used when not climbing on or over raw rock was all that harsh dolomite limestone, white or pale gray, sharp-edged, and abrasive as sandpaper. The path wound back and forth across the mountain’s south face a few times, sheltered from the sheer drop by huge scatters of boulders or upstanding incompletely eroded piers of limestone, like stalagmites. There was little to see here but pale, shattered stone, in chunks of every size, and occasional gnarled, stunted arolla pines or small patches of the local alpines, mostly in flower at this season. Over everything, the steepled towers of the mountain reared up, hard and white against the afternoon blue, the forced perspective of the view from the path making them look even more forbidding than they were to start with.

  There was one last switchback where the path gained nearly twenty meters in a final steep climb. Lee had to go from handhold to handhold up it, and was privately surprised that no one had sunk in pitons or a helping rail in such a difficult spot. But maybe Alfen have rules against it or something if this is a conservation area, she thought, going up the last couple of meters as fast as she could, to avoid slipping down out of control. She came out on top gasping a little, despite her best intentions. Dil’Undevhain stood waiting there, seemingly without a hair on him mussed and not even slightly out of breath.

  He waved a hand in front of him as Gelert came scrambling up behind Lee. “And this is it,” he said. “Istelin’ru Semivh.”

  Lee looked around. The place where they had stopped was little more than a twenty meter-wide terrace against the mountainside, all strewn with rubble like everything else. Some more of those strange piers of raw limestone stuck up here too, like fossilized Christmas trees, some cracked by the contrasts of heat and cold, or shattered by the fall of stone cracked away from the mountain wall above. Their feet were buried in gray-white gravel and scree; thin, light-colored scrubby grass stuck out here and there in tufts.

  “And this is all there is…” Lee said, looking around.

  “But certainly this view is enough,” dil’Undevhain said.

  It was hard to argue with that. The southern view, reaching down toward what would have been the kingdoms of the Italies in her own world, was a thorny vista of major and minor peaks, snow-free at this time of year, but still blinding white in the full sun. Lee walked a little way down to the far end of the terrace, where the view looked more eastward. There the mountains gave way more quickly to a view of low gray granite hills, the shadows of the westering sun already drowning some of the valleys between and behind them. She stood there, breathing the air, feeling the edge of chill that was beginning to come to it already, though the afternoon still had a ways to go.

  “‘Istelin’ru Semivh,’ you said. What’s the name mean?” Gelert said.

  Dil’Undevhain looked somewhat perplexed at that. “I am not sure how to translate it,” he said, looking downslope. “‘Last stop? Last hope?’ It is the only flat ground between here and the summit, the last place you can rest before the big climb. Or the only thing that will stop you between here and the valley, if you fall down from the traverse above.”

  Lee nodded. “Not much growing here,” she said, walking toward the back of the terrace, where the gravel was piled feet deep against the upward-leaping wall of the mountain. There were some patches of alpenrose there, some rooted in the gravel, some actually rooted opportunistically in cracks in the vertical wall, their branches and pink-red flowers dangling down and moving slightly in the wind.

  “No,” dil’Undevhain said, “except in the stories. Indeed in your world—it is Earth, I think?—this mountain is actually called the Rose Garden in one or another of the local languages. But that story keeps appearing in all kinds of shapes in the outworlds. There’s a king of the people who live in the mountains, or under the mountains, and he falls in love with a mortal woman—” Her guide laughed gently at the ridiculousness of it. Mixed marriage, Lee’s memory said to her: it’ll never work. At the time, she had meant it as a joke. Here and now, her Alfen guide did, too, but for entirely different reasons, ones Lee suspected she probably wouldn’t like. “He steals her away, and makes a great house for her in the mountains, and rears a crystal dome above it all. Then around the house, to please her, the King plants the garden of wonderful roses, and forbids all mortals to come there.”

  “But they come anyway,” Gelert said, “and destroy the garden. Then, powerful as he is, they take the mountain king prisoner and haul him off in chains.”

  Lee looked sideways at Gelert. Don’t rub it in or anything, Gel…

  I’m not sure I like his tone. And I don’t care if he knows it.

  His hostility took Lee slightly by surprise. Dil’Undevhain looked at Gelert with entirely uncaring amusement. “Fortunately,” he said, “it is just a story.”

  “With a happy ending, as I remember,” Lee said, trying to sound idle. “The trouble between the King and the humans ends, finally, and the princess agrees to marry him. And becomes immortal as well.”

  Dil’Undevhain laughed again, more softly this time; but the message behind the laughter was the same, a marginally courteous indulgence of another’s absurd idea. Lee turned away and bent down to one of the scrubby little bushes growing up from the gravel, knelt down on one knee to see if the flowers had a fragrance. They did, but it was most understated, a slight, spicy, heathery smell, almost piny; the scent of a plant that has no leisure to spend more than a minimum of its energy on fragrance, trusting its color to be enough to entice the mountain bees and flies in so monochrome a landscape. “I suppose,” Lee said, “there would be no way for anyone, realistically, to plant a rose garden up here…” For some reason, having to admit it saddened her a little.

  “I’m afraid the climate is much too variable for that,” said dil’Undevhain. “And the temperatures here are too cold, even in spring and fall. Snow can come any time between September and June.”

  “That wouldn’t be good for roses,” Lee said, “no. And the soil’s not great, either…” She ran her hand over the scree under the alpenrose. No soil there at all; a harsh gravelly bedding, this, though some of the stones had been slightly rounded by many years’ flow of water down the steep mountainside. Lee idly picked up one round, pale pebble, rubbing it in her fingers, feeling the weight of it.

  Then she bit her lip to keep from exclaiming in pain, for what she held was not smooth. It was razory sharp to the touch, as if newly shattered from the limestone crags above. Lee dared the slightest sideways glance, saw that dil’Undevhain’s back was turned. She got up, dusting her pants off with one hand, slipping the stone unseen into her pocket with the other.

  Dil’Undevhain had been looking at the angle of the sun. Now he turned and said, “Probably we should start back, soon, if we’re to return before dark.”

  “Of course,” Lee said, and followed dil’Undevhain as he started toward the path again. For a moment she paused, looked up at the mountain, willed the Sight to come, just for a second.

  Nothing… or at least, nothing in the usual mode. As if at the edges of perception, at some half-visible periphery, an aura of trouble hovered; old anguish, unresolved, lurking under the surface of things—a stain of pain, like a bruise. But otherwise, I’m blocked, Lee thought. And why?

  There were no answers for that. So why should I give any credence to anything I’m being told? Lee thought. She couldn’t get rid of
the idea that she was being lied to; in words, and somehow, even in images. Witnesses and defendants lied to her all the time, at home; but usually she was competent to detect it. Here, though, the rules seemed to have been changed.

  Seemed to…

  Their guide was heading down the path. As he turned back to see if Lee and Gelert were following, Lee was ready, and she bent her vision on him with all possible intent, willing the judicial state to assert itself in full, in haste, like a dropped rock.

  On him, ever so briefly, it worked, at least as far as communicating his uppermost thought. Dil’Undevhain’s eyes said it clearly enough to hers as she met them: There’s nothing here for you to steal. Do you finally believe it now? Then go back to your people and be glad you’re not dangerous enough to worry us.

  Lee kept her face as still as she would have in any interviewing room, and went after dil’Undevhain, gazing around at the landscape as she came, like any tourist inwardly saying farewell to a place she wouldn’t see again. But her mind was busy with other matters. Dil’Undevhain’s look was a lie, just one more of many. He’s ExAff after all, Lee thought. And the Alfen were worried about her and Gelert, worried enough to try to “defuse” them by bringing them up here. There’s something they’re afraid we’ll find out, so much that they want us to discount it ourselves. And as for the landscape around them…

  Lee thought of legends left over from the old days, before people actually began normalized travel between the worlds—stories of Elves giving people gold that turned to withered leaves, or turning one object into another with an ease that suggested that the matter and the physical reality of Earth were effortlessly malleable for them. Could that ability to shift appearances, even to shift the genuine states of matter, actually be sourced in something they learned from being resident in this universe? Lee thought again of the buildings in Ys, that looked one way and felt another; she thought of the mountains that had been there, until they weren’t. She was still blocked… but not entirely.