Half a War

Dust

For a boy who was reluctantly starting to consider himself a man, Koll had seen a few cities. Stern Vulsgard in spring and sprawling Kalyiv in summer, majestic Skekenhouse in its elf-walls and beautiful Yaletoft before they burned it. He’d made the long journey down the winding Divine, over the tall hauls and across the open steppe, finally to gape in wonder at the First of Cities, greatest settlement of men.

Beside the elf-ruins of Strokom they were all pinpricks.

He followed Skifr and the two ministers down black roads as wide as the market square in Thorlby, bored into the ground in echoing tunnels or stacked one upon the other on mighty pillars of stone, tangled up into giant madman’s knots while broken eyes of glass peered sadly down on the ruin. In silence they walked, each of them alone with their own worries. For the world, for those they knew, for themselves. Nothing lived. No plant, no bird, no crawling insect. There was only silence and slow decay. All around them, for mile upon mile, the impossible achievements of the past crumbled into dust.

‘What was this place like when the elves lived?’ whispered Koll.

‘Unimaginable in its scale and its light and its noise,’ said Skifr, leading the way with her head high, ‘in its planned confusion and its frenzied competition. All thousands of years silent.’

She let her fingertips trail along a crooked rail then lifted them, peered at the grey dust that coated them, tasted it, rubbed it against her thumb, frowned off down the cracked and buckled roadway.

‘What do you see?’ asked Koll.

Skifr raised one burned brow at him. ‘Only dust. There are no other omens here, for there is no future to look into but dust.’

From a high perch between two buildings a great snake of metal had fallen to lie twisted across the road.

‘The elves thought themselves all-powerful,’ said Skifr, as they picked their way over it. ‘They thought themselves greater than God. They thought they could remake all things according to a grand design. Look now upon their folly! No matter how great and glorious the making, time will unmake it. No matter how strong the word, strong the thought, strong the law, all must return to chaos.’

Skifr jerked her head back and sent spit spinning high into the air, arcing neatly down and spattering on rusted metal. ‘King Uthil says steel is the answer. I say his sight is short. Dust is the last answer to every question, now and always.’

Koll gave a sigh. ‘You’re a tower of laughs, aren’t you?’

Skifr’s jagged laughter split the silence, bouncing back from the dead faces of the buildings and making Koll jump. A strange sound here. It made him absurdly worried she’d somehow cause offence, though there’d been no one to offend for a hundred hundred years.

The old woman clapped him on the shoulder as she walked after Father Yarvi and Mother Scaer. ‘That all depends on what you find funny, boy.’

As the light faded they crept between buildings so high the street was made a shaded canyon between them. Spires that pierced the heavens even in their ruin, endless planes of elf-glass still winking pink and orange and purple with the darkly reflected sunset, twisted beams of metal sprouting from their shattered tops like thorns from a thistle.

That brought Thorn to Koll’s thoughts and he muttered a prayer for her, even if the gods weren’t here to listen. When Brand died, it seemed as if something had died in her. Maybe no one comes through a war quite as alive as they were.

The road was gouged and slumping, choked with things of crumpled metal, their blistered paint flaking. There were masts as tall as ten men, festooned with skeins of wires that hung between the buildings like the cobwebs of colossal spiders. There were elf-letters everywhere, signs daubed on the roads, twisted about poles, banners proudly unfurled over every broken window and doorway.

Koll stared up at one set blazoned wide across a building, the last man-high letter fallen down to swing sadly from its corner.

‘All this writing,’ he murmured, neck stiff from staring up at it.

‘The elves did not limit the word to the few,’ said Skifr. ‘They let knowledge spread to all, like fire. Eagerly they fanned the flames.’

‘And were all burned by them,’ murmured Mother Scaer. ‘Burned to ashes.’

Koll blinked up at the great sign. ‘Do you understand it?’

‘I might know the characters,’ said Skifr. ‘I might even know the words. But the world they spoke of is utterly gone. Who could plumb their meaning now?’

They passed by a shattered window, shards of glass still clinging to its edge, and Koll saw a woman grinning at him from inside.

He was so shocked he couldn’t even scream, just stumbled back into Skifr’s arms, pointing wildly at that ghostly figure. But the old woman only chuckled.

‘She cannot hurt you now, boy.’

And Koll saw it was a painting of amazing detail, stained and faded. A woman, holding up her wrist to show a golden elf-bangle, smiling wildly as though it gave her impossible joy to wear such a thing. A woman, long and thin and strangely dressed, but a woman still.

‘The elves,’ he muttered. ‘Were they … like us?’

‘Terribly like and terribly unlike,’ said Skifr, Yarvi and Scaer coming to stand beside her, all gazing at that faded face from beyond the long fog of the past. ‘They were far wiser, more numerous, more powerful than us. But, just like us, the more powerful they became, the more powerful they wished to become. Like men, the elves had holes in them that could never be filled. All of this …’ And Skifr spread her arms wide to the mighty ruins, her cloak of rags billowing in the restless breeze. ‘All of this could not satisfy them. They were just as envious, ruthless and ambitious as us. Just as greedy.’ She raised one long arm, one long hand, one long finger to point at the woman’s radiant smile. ‘It is their greed that destroyed them. Do you hear me, Father Yarvi?’

‘I do,’ he said, shouldering his pack and, as always, pressing onwards, ‘and could live with fewer elf-lessons and more elf-weapons.’

Mother Scaer frowned after him, fingering her own collection of ancient bangles. ‘I say he could use the opposite.’

‘What happens after?’ called Koll.

There was a pause before Father Yarvi looked back. ‘We use the elf-weapons against Bright Yilling. We carry them across the straits to Skekenhouse. We find Grandmother Wexen and the High King.’ His voice took on a deadly edge. ‘And I keep my sun-oath and my moon-oath to be revenged upon the killers of my father.’

Koll swallowed. ‘I meant after that.’

Master frowned at apprentice. ‘We can ford that river when we reach it.’ And he turned and carried on.

Quite as if he hadn’t spared it a thought until now. But Koll knew Father Yarvi was not a man to leave the field of the future unsown with plans.

Gods, was Skifr right? Were they the same as the elves? Their little feet in mighty footprints, but on the same path? He thought of Thorlby made an empty ruin, a giant tomb, the people of Gettland burned away to leave only silence and dust, perhaps some fragment of his carved mast left, a ghostly echo for those who came long after to puzzle over.

Koll took one last glance back at that gloriously happy face thousands of years dead, and saw something glint among the shattered glass. A golden bangle, just like the one in the painting, and Koll darted out a hand and slipped it into his pocket.

He doubted the elf-woman would miss it.