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.
48
The elf downstairs made a run for it. She dropped out the bottom of the disk and headed up the path already blazed by the self-immolating egg. Marsha didn't have any luck catching her. I didn't let it worry me. She was completely weird and doubtless had no clue how to get by in the country, without help from her strange, sorcerous toys. She should not be hard to track. Just follow the commotion she caused.
Maybe Colonel Block could get me a big fat medal for having saved Karenta from the foreign sorcerers and sorceresses. Maybe the flying pigs would start evicting the pigeons from their traditional roosts. Which sure would leave a mess around all those dead and incompetent generals posing outside the Chancery.
The common wisdom among former grunts is that competent generals wouldn't have screwed up so bad they got themselves killed and therefore there wouldn't have been any need for a memorial.
Soldiers are a cynical bunch.
In the process of exploring the interior of the discus I discovered Cypres Prose installed in a padded box behind a door that locked from the outside. The little horizontal closet was soundproof. It was on a floor above the one with the marvelous lights and the wonderful view.
The upper level seemed to constitute of crew quarters and such, if you went over it just guessing.