Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (26 page)

They walked in and looked through the big doors to right and left that opened from the main room. The one on the left was plainly meant for Gelert, at least half its great floor a single silken cushion, with heaps more silks lying here and there for warmth, and a door leading into a massive bath walled and floored in some dark sparkling stone that was warm to the touch. On Lee’s side the bedroom was hung with darkly rich draperies and tapestries, floored with a beautiful old woven rug in designs the like of which Lee had never seen before. The bed had an ornately carved, curved headboard nearly two meters high, arching up and over the head of the bed into an outreaching canopy, as if the designer had been afraid it might start raining inside. The whole effect was lavish, but layered, an effect entirely different from the polished perfection of the hotel room in Ys.
This place looks like people have lived in it…

My problem
, Gelert said, 
is that it looks like people have died in it.
 He was examining some marks on the furniture in the common sitting area. 
I’d swear that’s a sword cut. Lee, does that look like a sword
 
cut to you?

She wandered idly past the chair in question, glanced at it. 
No.

I wish I could be so sure. Either way, no one’s even polished it out. The maintenance around here
 
leaves something to be desired.

Maybe it’s something historic.

If it is, that just makes me
 more 
nervous.

Lee went back out into the central hall that led to the balcony, strolled down to its door, or where its door should have been, and stood gazing out. “Why can’t I feel the wind from outside?” she said, and walked out onto the balcony. The few steps answered her question: the sensation as of a spiderweb brushing across her skin told her there was some kind of forcefield between the window and the room.

For a few moments she leaned there on the parapet, looking across the valley to the palace built into the cliff. After a little while Gelert came up behind her, got up on his hind legs, with his paws on the parapet, and looked over.

“I’ve never slept in a theme park before,” Lee said, glancing up at the nearby towers, spired in silver and orichalc, clustered like candles in a stony candelabrum. “I feel like there should be somebody down in the bushes, wishing they were a glove upon my hand, like something out of Shakespeare.”

Gelert sat down again and said nothing for a few moments. Finally, silently, he said, 
You feel it too,
 
don’t you.

Lee didn’t nod, but inwardly she said, 
There’s a lot more here than shows at first glance.

Or scent
, Gelert said, 
first or second.
 He breathed the late afternoon air, looking toward the mountains, closing his eyes to scent better. Lee followed his gaze. There was a claustrophobic quality to those mountains, a feeling as if they were not entirely a natural barrier, not an accident of geology, but a wall in truth, erected on purpose to keep something out…or in.

Something there that’s not showing
, Gelert said. 
Can you feel it?

Yes
, Lee said. 
Come on.

The two of them stood there for some minutes. After a while Lee stopped wondering how long they were spending, and simply concentrated on bending her Sight against those mountains, willing them with all her might to show her what they had to show. But they stood there, still as stone, mute as stone, and would not reveal anything at all. They were rock, just rock; nothing else. They had stood there for more than a million years, and had seen nothing worth seeing, and meant nothing in particular to anyone. The only secret they held in them was gold, clenched there inside them as if in a fist; but even that secret was an open one, no news to anybody.

Lee opened her eyes, let out a long breath of frustration. 
Anything?
 She said to Gelert.

Nothing at all. Which, as we both know, is wildly unlikely.

A glamour?

If it is one, as we understand it, I’ve never felt one so strong. It can’t even be felt as such. Which
 
means it’s powerful enough to override our perception of reality—

Or our perception of reality is being more directly interfered with.

Always a possibility.
 Lee thought again of the roses, of how a power like theirs might theoretically be enough, in some other universe, to subvert even the operation of a cardinal Virtue, of Justice herself.

If it is
, Gelert said, 
we’re screwed. The whole reason for us coming has been derailed; we’ve
 
effectively been neutralized.

The other possibility
, Lee said, 
is that it’s
 not 
a glamour as we understand it, but something else,
 
some other kind of power being bent against us. That our judgment of what we’re Seeing or
 
Scenting is correct…and we need to keep doing just what we’re doing now.

Gelert sighed. 
We’re going to have to play it that way for the time being
, he said. 
But I smell trouble
 
on the air that I can’t pin down any more specifically than that. Something here is wrong. The air
 
says so, the water says so, the stones on the ground and the trees on the hill and the sky looking
 
down all say it, too…

The question is, are we going to be able to find out what before they send us home again?

Way back down at the end of the main room, someone knocked on the door. 
Not right this minute
, Gelert said. “Oh my gosh, we should have been changed by now…”

Lee said, for the benefit of whoever might be doing surveillance on them at the moment. “Come on …”

*

Lee had attended her share of governmental sessions in her time, everything from the UN&ME in general session to that recurring bout of tag-team wrestling otherwise known as the biweekly meeting of the Ellay City Council. In content, the 
Miraha
‘s “guest assembly” was probably no different from most of these, insofar as it involved a great many people, usually of advanced years, standing up and making long leisurely speeches in indecipherable language. 
The only difference here
, Lee said silently, 
is that even
 
in the Senate, the average age isn’t anywhere near as advanced as these people’s…and the
 
Senate don’t speak Alfen.

We should count ourselves lucky they can speak at all
, Gelert said. 
These people may not be
 
speaking any language we can understand, but at least they dress better than the Senate.

Lee was inclined to agree, but wondered if perhaps they were doing it in self-defense. The building itself came of a period in Alfen architecture that had favored not only huge arched and domed spaces, but a luxury in materials and execution that would have made some parts of the Vatican, or for that matter the palace of the Dragon Emperor of Xaihon, look like a thatched hut by comparison. Elaborate frescoes and hangings adorned every wall of the long hallway that brought them under the central dome where the 
Miraha
 sat; delicate and impossibly complex mosaics and enamel-inlaid tilings covered the floors; detailings, carvings, and ornamentation in fairy gold were everywhere. Whole pillars made of semiprecious stone, especially a blue agate lined with green, had been inlaid with tiny gems that winked and glittered in the torchlight as one walked by—for the committee had actually been led into the vast space by Alfen women dressed all in black, wearing crowns and collars of black gems and bearing genuine torches. Gelert had muttered down his implant about not knowing whether they were destined for a barbecue or an 
auto-da-fé
, and Lee had to restrain herself from poking him.

In the central hall they had been conducted into the middle of the 
Miraha
, under the great painted dome, and were nearly blinded by the shifting glitter of still more fairy gold and jewels on the lawmakers gathered there: either woven into their ceremonial garb—the Alfen shortcloak and trews or halfgown here augmented with dagged and slashed sleeves, and quilted or cross-gartered with even more fairy gold, in tissue—or worn as great chains of office, massive, many-linked. Lee had felt positively underdressed in her plain lanthanomancer’s black and the simple chain of her rank.

But at least we get to sit down
, she had thought. Chairs had been placed for the committee in the very center of the space. The eighty members of the 
Miraha
 did not sit, but stood. There was only one chair, off to one side, of plain black wood and very simply design, uncushioned, with a tall back on which was carved a more ornate version of the 
Miraha
‘s sigil, the hexagon and the spear.

Gelert, sitting down beside Lee, had looked around with amusement at the standing arrangements.
Maybe this is intended to keep the speeches shorter
, he said. But the hope proved vain. The speeches—when a given speaker deigned to speak in English—said a great deal about mutual respect, and the necessity for peoples to listen to one another, and much else. But looking at the faces of the speakers, and not even trying particularly hard to See, Lee thought she had never heard so much lying in her life. The atmosphere of resentment was overwhelming.

Gelert’s nose nearly never stopped twitching. 
They hate our guts
, he said. 
Someone up high, and I’m
 
betting it’s the Elf-King, told them to have us here and like it. And they’ve managed the first part… but not the second.

And we have to go to a party with these people later?
 Lee said. 
That sounds like all kinds of fun…

Protocol, Lee.

I’d rather work
, she said. Here in the midst of all this privilege and power, the heart of Alfheim’s wealth and influence, and amid all these people who despite their young faces had the eyes of old and wicked politicians, every one—she could not stop seeing the face of Omren dil’Sorden, dead too young without even really knowing why.

You’re doing your work
, Gelert said. 
You’re getting up their noses, by being a human at the heart of
 
their world. And tomorrow you’ll have your chance to get farther up their noses still… so just
 
hang on.

She didn’t answer; she knew he was right. Eventually it was all over, and first Per and then the rest of the committee greeted the 
Miraha
‘s speaker, a solemn man with the dignity of some ancient Roman statue and the perfect face of a supermodel, high-cheekboned, dark-eyed, lean and graceful. Lee smiled at him and spoke to him courteously, and moved on a trifle more quickly than she might have in other circumstances…even at an Ellay City Council meeting. 
I’m beginning to lose it
, she said to Gelert, as their group was led out once more, back to the residence tower, by the women in black with the torches. 
I’m starting to really dislike these people, and I can’t afford to do that.

It’s your blood sugar
, Gelert said. 
It’s been a long time since breakfast.

I hope you’re right. Otherwise, I’m not going to do poor Omren dil’Sorden any good. Or anyone
 
else…

That evening they were feted as royally as they had not been on their arrival in Alfheim.
That by itself
 
was an issue that interested me
, Gelert said as he got himself ready for the gathering. 
I was wondering
 
when they were going to start treating us more like official guests of the government and less like
 
a cut-rate package tour.

Lee nodded idly. She was feeling much better—the cold collation and wine that the staff had brought up for them after the 
Miraha
 session had taken care of her hunger and her somewhat frayed temper—and now she was brushing down her dress for the reception. It was at least the third time on this trip that she’d had to brush it down, since even though she might be worlds away from them, somehow everything black Lee owned managed to pick up white fur from Gelert’s kids. 
Not sure how you mean
, she said, picking off some of the more resistant fluff between her fingers.

Think about it. One day they import us from JFK and dump us in a Hilton, and we don’t see
 
anybody higher-ranking than a few accountants and the fragrant dil’Hemrev from Alfen External
 
Affairs. Then something happens, somebody in the
 Miraha 
sends a shuttle for us, and now all the
 
upper-ups are coming out of the woodwork to make nice on us. Has there been a ‘palace coup’ of
 
some kind? Does ExAff have a new boss all of a sudden, one who’s more kindly disposed to us? Or, regardless of what dil’Hemrev told us, did the Elf-King perhaps get back from some trip,
 
decide the high-profile UN committee isn’t getting high-profile enough treatment, and kick some
 
of the civil servants’ butts upstairs, or down?

Lee thought about that for a moment. It seemed as possible as anything else. Then, 
“Fragrant?”
 Lee said.

Gelert blinked at her, then grinned. 
Irony. Probably I should have said ‘redolent,’ as in ‘she
 
stinks.’

Not literally
, Lee said. 
At least not that I noticed…

It’s not just her perfume
, Gelert said. 
That woman’s up to something.