Ross Lawhead - A Hero's throne

The aide spread the dictation he took and the map that Kione Traast had drawn in front of him. The prince studied them for a moment and then brushed them aside.

“Useless. We raided the mountain fortress weeks ago and captured this document, along with the others.”

The aide pursed his lips. “Well, we suspected as much. Here, try the other,” he said, holding the other silver scoop out.

The prince made a face as if it were his mother telling him to finish his strained prunes, but nonetheless grabbed the cup and dipped it into K?yle’s jar. He took a sip and finished it off, then he just sat, staring at nothing, for about twenty minutes.

“Nothing,” he said eventually, shaking his head. “It was just music. Wordless, pointless music. Come, let us waste no more time here.”

He rose and swept out of the room, his entourage in his wake.

The door slammed and Daniel stayed, gazing morosely at the jars containing the heads of two men that he had considered friends in this strange world. There would be no rescue or escape for them.

Daniel awoke. Although heavily traumatised and confused, he knew exactly where he was-back in the middle of the massive plain again. Memory of the events in the Night were already scurrying away from him, leaving only scars behind them. He prodded gently at them to see if they gave anything up, but once again it was only just impressions-nothing like the violent clarity of the first time. The echo of pain and flashes of odd images,

conversations, and confrontations. Then the impressions of what had remained finally dissolved away.

He wondered how long he’d been in the Night, and what was happening here now. The events of what happened before the Night seemed like a long, long way away now, as an old man might remember a distant childhood. The vivid emotion was still real, but detached.

What was going on in Ni?ergeard?

Ni?ergeard -that brought something back. He had seen the golden and silver riders again, he remembered. He thought that he always saw them at the end of his times in the Night. He couldn’t remember if that was the case, but somehow that fact felt right. He feared the silver rider and knew, inherently, that it was vital that he escape him and his “dreams of death.” But the silver rider was more than just death-it was pain, fear, and all the bad things of life. The golden rider was hope, security, romance, all the things worth saving. He had to keep hold of that. He remembered the picture he’d received during his first Night-him, sitting on a throne of victory, his enemies’ bones at his feet. Freya by his side, a new rule of the nation of Ni?ergeard-part of a New United Kingdom of the Spirit. That was clear. That was the reality he needed to strive for, to produce through his will, if such a thing were possible. He would be the king of a new country, just as Wales and Scotland were a part of Great Britain, but one that the world had never seen, unless the stories of King Arthur and the holy kings of legend were true.

At least, that had been one of the visions. But he also knew that although they had all been visions of victory and triumph, not all of them were good. And then, perhaps, not every victory was perfect. Life was complicated, and it seemed to Daniel likely that these visions would help him to make sense of his own future. He was closer to a spiritual plane here, and if a revelation were to be had, then he would find it and bring it back, somehow, to his own world.

But what would the cost be? The Night was brutal and horrific, quite literally a hell. And the things that worried him most-beyond the pain, or its inevitability if he continued to stay in this world-was that he nearly always forgot what he experienced, and every time he came back, less of him seemed to make it. His confidence and righteousness had been eaten away to the point that he was now questioning if he could indeed accomplish anything of worth here in Elfland, or back at home, for that matter. His surety of purpose was faltering.

He sat for another few hours, trying to puzzle out all the logic and fuzzy philosophy of his situation. Then he rose and almost automatically began searching for the Elves in Exile again. If helping them win this battle was part of his penance, then he should get on with it. The problem was that he had no assurance at all that this was a penance, or that there were lessons to be learned.

After a long time of searching, he saw a smudge on the horizon in the southeast that he took to be smoke, and he navigated himself toward that. Whatever it was, he was certain that it was something to do with the war, or would give information that would lead him to it. With such a focal point, he made much quicker progress and had the scene in view in what seemed like less than a minute.

It was a battlefield, but one that had already been spent. The “field” itself was actually several fields spread between two forests-it was apparently part of an elfish farm, entirely open except for low walls, ditches, ridges, and hedges demarcating one cropland from another. The fight had ranged over at least a dozen of these spaces. Daniel had no experience in evaluating or judging what had occurred here, but the battle looked hard fought. Bodies of elfish warriors were spread all over, sometimes clustering here, sometimes there. There were also horses, so many horses, laying everywhere, dead and dying. Many more were tethered to the walls that ran along the side of the fields where a dirt road meandered. The two fighting sides must have been entirely mounted.

Warriors in what looked to be blue enamelled armour trimmed with black were walking over the field, dragging the wounded-indiscriminate of side, it seemed-off the field and into a circle of elfish healers. These were the victors, apparently, and Daniel wondered who they represented.

The smoke he had spotted came from a patch of grassland at the far end of the field of conflict, which was near a copse of tall, birch-like trees. Here some tents and furniture were smouldering, and the figures in blue were trying desperately to put it out. The tent had been collapsed and the canvas pulled away from what was underneath it, which was papers, journals, and silken cloths. These were spread out and stamped on with a mindful precision in order to extinguish their smoking edges. There was a man shouting orders to these soldiers, and Daniel drifted lower to hear what was being said.

“Faster, you lugheads! Put those papers out! Quickly and well! No, not like that, like this ! They’ll smoulder into oblivion unless you do it properly. Don’t you know that destruction of vital knowledge of the enemy is treason? Your lives depend on this act, so let’s pretend we all actually care about your miserable existences and step keenly!”

So, the actions weren’t so noble, as Daniel first thought, as to extinguish a fire so close to a wooded area. Daniel drifted upward and spotted a cluster of elves wearing more than the usual amount of armour and ornamentation. These must be the captains and generals. He went toward them. One of them was Prince Kione Traast from the necrologist’s halls.

“Hurry them up,” he was saying, annoyed, to a cluster of clerical-looking elves. “The ground is starting to eat the blood and you know how they’ll only complain when they see that our wounded are being moved.”

“It does no good to rush them, my prince,” said one unflappablelooking elf. “Battlescrying is an ancient art and one that demands much anticipation.”

“Well, then it’s their own cursed fault if things move. I don’t want to hear any excuses or blame from them.”

A young messenger came running from the field behind the prince. “They are ready, my prince.”

Behind him, from the woods, strode four elderly elves in red robes and each one was wearing thin, bone-like stilts that allowed them to tower above all others on the battlefield. They also carried long, black poles that could reach down to the ground. They stood roughly two storeys above anyone else around.