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 fuck,” 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 Morget-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 Morget’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 Morget 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 fuck’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.”
Chapter Eighty-five
“Heave!” Balint called. Croy and Morget hauled on the ropes they held, their backs straining. Croy’s arms felt as numb as wood, but still he pulled. “Heave!”
The barrels shifted a foot farther up the ramp.
They were a quarter of the way up, with a good hundred feet of incline to go.
Each of the barrels was too heavy for the knight or the barbarian to carry themselves, and the five of them together made an immense weight. They could be turned on their sides and rolled across flat stretches of floor, but getting them up to higher levels was beyond human strength.
“Heave!”
Luckily Balint had a pulley in her pack, and enough rope to make a block and tackle. Croy understood little of how that actually helped-something to do with multiplying the force involved, the dwarf had said. He hadn’t really been listening. What he did know was that the barrels were moving, inching their way up a long ramp to the top level of the Vincularium.
“Heave!”
Of course, once the humans and the dwarf did get up there, the revenants would certainly come to kill them. Croy and Morget would have all the grim work they could handle, fighting off the undead elves long enough to get the barrels into place.
He didn’t worry about that. He kept all his attention on his rope. It helped if he thought there was an elf in a noose on the other end.
“Heave!”
