The ladder took me up into a small metal room that was maybe ten feet across. Its ceiling was five feet high. I had to move in a stoop that started my back aching in moments. At its extremities the room’s floor conformed to the external curve of the discus. The room itself seemed suitable only for storage.
“Singe?”
My voice sounded strange in that place.
Singe didn’t answer me.
“Don’t be playing games just because you’re invisible.”
Still no answer.
The back side of the ladder went on up to another level. I swung around there, looked up.
There did seem to be an opening—which was closed. Mostly closed. A bit of fabric had gotten caught in a gap where the closure abutted the head of the ladder. The lighting was poor but the fabric resembled that of Singe’s shirt.
I pushed. Nothing gave but the muscles in my back. I tried again, twisting. The closure slid sideways an inch. I thought I had it now. I pushed and twisted some more. The crack widened a few more inches, then wouldn’t respond to any effort I made.
I tried to look through the crack. I couldn’t see anything but nothing. I followed up by snaking a cautious hand in to feel around. Nobody stomped on my fingers. It’s a wonderful life when the highlight of your working day is that nobody stomped on your fingers.
I felt around some more. It seemed that the main reason the entry wouldn’t open any farther was that Singe was lying on it. Getting her off proved to be a challenge. But I was up to it. I was a trained, veteran Royal Marine.
Eventually I slithered through the gap. Singe was lying in plain sight, mostly on another metal floor like the one below. This room was perfectly round, with another ceiling that had to be uncomfortably low even for the elves who used it. One of those was slumped in one of four chairs gracing the room. The chairs were all fixed to the floor.
The wonders of that round room were too numerous to recount. I think I was too numb to recognize a lot of them as anything special. There seemed to be thousands of little glowing lights, for example. Some were green or red, or yellow or purple or even white. Some kept flashing on and off. Most seemed content just to be there, showing themselves.
I’ve seen some wild sorcery in my day, including the kind that melts mountains. Yet I was more impressed with this vision than I’d been with anything I’d seen before. The numbers were what did it.
Then there were windows something like the one at Casey’s, most of them more nearly horizontal than vertical. But the really eye-popping thing, the overwhelming thing, was the outer wall, all the way around the room.
It was like that was missing, not there at all until you touched it. The woods were visible there pretty much as I would’ve seen them had I been standing on a fifteen-foot-high platform. I was seeing the world from the altitude that Doris and Marsha saw it.
I couldn’t hear anything, though.
I checked Singe’s pulse. She’d be all right. I checked the elf. Somebody had slugged this one from behind. I’d bet on any invisible ratgirl. I couldn’t find a pulse in any of the usual places but he was twitching already. I got him plucked of his possessions and tied up with odds and ends. Just in time.
And just in time for the arrival of the three glowing balls. Those touched down carefully after a wary approach.
When he saw that happening, my captive elf began to kick and struggle. He wasn’t pleased. I felt an inarticulate mental pressure but he never said an actual word.
I shut the door in the floor and parked both Singe and the elf atop it. When he tried to move I admonished him gently with a toe. He learned faster than a pup.
I looked outward again.
The three glowing objects gradually stopped doing that. They turned out to be dull gray lopsided metal eggs not more than ten feet tall, the fat half of each egg downward. Each stood on three metal legs as skinny as broom handles.
Nothing happened for a while. Then, as an opening began to appear in the side of one of the gray eggs, Doris came bounding out of the woods and dealt that very egg a mighty overhand smack with his club. The blow left a sizable dent.
Then there was a flash. And Doris staggered away, not knocked down but not real sure where he was anymore. A vaguely feminine silver elf dropped a ladder from the assaulted egg and scrambled down to the ground. She seemed to be seeing the fact but didn’t want to believe that Doris hadn’t been destroyed by the flash.
I got all that from feelings within me and from elven body language that probably meant nothing of the sort because the creature wasn’t human.
It hit the ground running toward Doris, in a truly foul mood. The groll himself had gotten lost in the woods. He was blundering around in confusion.
The other two silver elves left their eggs. They showed hints of femininity, too. From the remove at which I watched I couldn’t be completely sure, however. Though there did seem to be minor physical differences from the other elves, nothing was absolutely convincing. Maybe if you were a silver elf you could tell. Kind of the way slugs can tell the boys from the girls.
Plainly, they didn’t label themselves the way humans do, sexually or by pinpointing weirdness, physical disparity, or attractiveness.
Never mind. I don’t need to get my ulcers burning about human nature. I’m all growed up now, Maw. I know we ain’t gonna get nowhere wishin’ an’ hopin’. People are too damned stubborn.
Speaking of stubborn. Here came Marsha, half the size of a house, crawling on his belly, sneaking up on the lead egg only abandoned a moment earlier by a silver elf with cute little crabapple breasts. Marsha had learned something while watching his brother precipitate attack.
When he was close enough Marsha reached out and, with a sideways swipe of his club, swatted one of the egg’s legs out from under it.
Which didn’t turn out to be quite as clever as I’d thought before he did it.
When the egg fell it tipped straight toward him. He had to scramble to get out of the way. And even then he wasn’t safe.
The elves decided to chase him.
The violence of the egg’s fall shook the discus. For a second I was afraid I was going down, too.
The fallen egg began to glow in a patch on its bottom. Then it started sliding around drunkenly, darting and stopping like a water bug, spinning, tearing up trees. It knocked over the only uninjured egg, struck the discus a ferocious glancing blow, and panicked the new arrivals. They didn’t know which way to run. Finally, the egg blistered off in a straight line, ripped through the pond and the woods beyond, then plowed a deep furrow through a vineyard almost all the way to the top of the slope before it came to rest. At that point it seemed both to melt and to sink slowly into the earth.
Marsha had to be amazed by what he’d accomplished.
The silver elves were amazed, too. And distraught in the extreme.
I was now reasonably confident that they did communicate the way the Dead Man does. I couldn’t pick out any words but the atmosphere was pregnant with emotion. There was a lot of blaming and finger-pointing going on, driven by a terror of being marooned. That fear became a notch more intense when the three examined their surviving egg and discovered that Doris’s ill-advised attack had crippled it somehow.
“Uh-oh.”
The three all stared at the disk like it might be their salvation. After a brief commune they all produced a variety of gray fetishes and began poking at them with long, skinny, nailless fingers. One of the little girls came forward, toward me, passing out of view beneath my feet. Two minutes later there was a whining noise from the area where Singe and the captive elf lay sprawled.
I scooted over there. The door in the floor was trying to move. The weight piled on it kept it from doing so. I sensed a considerable frustration down below. That was one—maybe—lady who didn’t think things ought to be going this way. A—maybe—woman whose day had been on the brink of triumph, but which had turned to shit in her hands in a matter of minutes.
“Been there, sweetheart,” I muttered. I began to look around, seeking something identifiable as a nonlethal weapon. I didn’t want to hurt anybody if I really was dealing with women. Possibly the most bizarre aspect of this business so far was the fact that no one had gotten killed. We had one elf with a broken arm and we had me with a bumper crop of aches and bruises—acquired from ratpeople not directly involved in the case—but otherwise the whole thing was almost civilized. And no silver elf had yet done anyone a direct physical injury.
I didn’t find anything that could be used as a weapon. Maybe I could rip an arm off the elf I did have and use it to harvest the new crop. I did retain plenty of pieces of steel in a variety of shapes and sizes, all with very sharp edges, should the situation grow hair, though.
Even so, these weird people didn’t seem to be impressed by weapons. Which left me wondering just how bright they could be.
The elf downstairs tried to get the floor door open again. I sat down nearby, ready to crack her knuckles with the butt of a knife if she stuck a hand through the way I had. I’m not always a perfect gentleman.
Some of the little flashy lights expired suddenly. Outside, the most voluptuous elf began to jump up and down. Evidently she’d solved some puzzle and was totally excited. She didn’t jiggle much, though.
The other elf looked over her shoulder. Clearly, she disapproved of her sidekick’s demonstration but was pleased with their results. Her daddy longlegs fingers began to prance across another of those gray fetish things.
More lights went out. There was a declining whine, fading fast, never noticed until it went.
“I don’t think that’s a good sign,” I told myself.
Still more lights went out.
“Definitely not a good sign.”
Up on the see-through wall—which I just now noticed had a curved shape in the vertical dimension that allowed it to show a lot more than a flat window would—I saw a large piece of deadwood come arcing out of the woods, spinning end for end horizontally. It was a log I would’ve had trouble lifting.
It got both silver elves.
I felt their rush of pain inside my head.