Звезда Пандоры

“Light and dark, and those alone. Strike you not the black and the gold for it leaves a terrible mark upon the sky at the height of day. Heed you loud the ides of winterfall.”

Ozzie ran that through his mind, fearing he was losing track of what was being said. But then that was always the way when you talked to the Silfen. “All of humanity needs to see what you become. I walk for them to that place. Where is the path?”

“Knowing is in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat; rejoice for it is yours as much as ours, to live among it is glorious. Look to nature in the fullest of bloom, bend the sky and the ground to your bidding if you truly can, for what will be has also been. Fond farewells and fond joinings are all part of the endless turn of worlds upon worlds, and who are we to cry judge upon which is the jolliest of all.”

“This child weeps nightly for his lost father and mother.”

“We all weep together, huddled in the breath of this iciest of winds in fell consequence we do ignore, for who has lost who in this benighted time asunder.”

The Silfen began to get up.

“Well thanks, man,” Ozzie said in English. “It’s been unreal.”

“Hasten us as the quarral flies to its nest amid the lonely lake beyond dale and tonight’s river.”

“I hope you reach it okay.”

Nine Sky sprang to his feet. He and all the other Silfen were running now, hurrying around the side of the pool. Their wild strange song filled the air again. Then they were gone, vanishing into the quiet spaces between the tree trunks.

Ozzie let out a long breath. He looked down at the boy, who wore an expression of troubled wonder. “You okay there, man?”

“They’re so… different,” Orion said slowly.

“Could be,” Ozzie said. “They’re either stoned the whole time, or my memory is nothing like as good as the warranty claims. Whatever it is, they don’t make a lot of sense.”

“I don’t think they’re supposed to make sense, Ozzie. They’re elves, mortals aren’t part of their world. We’ll never be able to understand them.”

“They’re as real as we are, maybe more so if I’m right about them. But I can certainly see why all our dippy hippies love them. They know things they shouldn’t. One little glimpse of forbidden knowledge amid all the gibberish, and they’re instant messiahs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where I live, for a start. That was more than enough to convince me I’m on the right track—pardon the pun.”

“What track?”

“I’m trying to find where the Silfen go after they leave their forests.”

“Why?”

“I have a question for the thing they become.”

“What thing?”

“I’m not sure.”

“That’s silly.”

“Yeah, man. Put it like that, I guess it is a bit.”

“Will we find Mom and Dad on the way?”

“Honestly: I doubt it.”

“Nine Sky didn’t seem to know where they were, did he?” Orion said.

“You understood all of that?”

“Some of it. You speak Silfen really well.”

He gave the boy a wink. “That’s because I cheat. It’s the only way to get through life.”

“So where do we go now?”

“Same place as before,” Ozzie said; he glanced around the big clearing, unsure where they’d come in. “Down the first path we find, and without a clue.”

NINE

Legend has it that the asteroid was a lump of pure gold, the core of which remained intact and now lies buried deep beneath the castle. Whatever the actual composition was, it certainly had an above average density. When it hit Lothian’s southern continent, a couple of centuries before humans arrived, it carved out a perfectly circular crater three kilometers across. The rim wall was over one hundred meters high, with quite a steep inner face; the central peak rose to nearly four hundred meters.

The first settlers, all from Scotland, had a large Edinburgh contingent among them, nostalgic for the old town and dynamic in their approach to their new homeworld. Their bigger and better attitude was given an aggressive outlet when it came to building the new capital, Leithpool, with the crater as its nucleus. An entire river, the High Forth, was diverted for eleven kilometers along a newly built aqueduct embankment to pour over the crater’s rim wall, slowly filling the ring-shaped lake inside. They wanted a castle at the center, of course, but the new island’s easy gradient hardly matched the jutting rock crag to be found dominating the heart of old Edinburgh. A fleet of civil engineering bots got to work carving as the surrounding waters rose. Over the following years, three rock-blade pinnacles were hacked out from the solitary mound, sharp and rugged enough to fit into any Alpine range. A Bavarian-style castle was grafted onto the apex of the tallest peak, reached by a solitary road that spiraled up around the sheer rock cliffs.