A Thief in the Night

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 f*ck,” 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 Mörget—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 Mörget’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 Mörget 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 f*ck’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.”