Bedlam's Edge Read online

  For Nicanaordil had led his clan out of Europe long before any other Sidhe had even begun to trouble themselves over the encroaching mortals. The incursion of William of Normandy’s troops into England had prompted Nicanaordil to remove himself and his kin from a land so overrun with contentious mortals. Goldengrove settled itself in southern California, and engaged in no further converse with other Elfhames. Nicanaordil was restraint incarnate; slow to anger and slower still to take action.

  And so when Sun-Descending arrived and laid claim to the City of Angels, in the days when the Spanish ruled the human land, Lord Nicanaordil paid no heed to this encroachment upon his domain. After all, the city then was little more than a gathering place for dust, fleas, and dealers in hides that stank so badly even humans preferred to stay far upwind of the masses of stacked uncured cattle skin.

  Nicanaordil observed Sun-Descending over the decades, watched and waited as the City of Angels prospered and grew—and Sun-Descending’s Sidhe became troublesome. My brother and I overheard our elders whispering that Lord Nicanaordil had almost made the decision to confront Sun-Descending and banish its Sidhe from Goldengrove’s lands, when Sun-Descending ceased to trouble our city. Once again Nicanaordil’s masterful control had proved wise. Sun-Descending’s Sidhe had vanished; no action need be taken.

  The other Elfhame that intruded upon California’s golden land was Misthold. But Misthold lay far to the north, its Nexus anchored in the hills ringing San Francisco Bay. Lord Nicanaordil had begun to consider what to do about Elfhame Misthold; in the fullness of time, he would come to a decision. Until then, Misthold could be ignored. Perhaps time itself would resolve the question, as it had the matter of Elfhame Sun-Descending.

  And just as other Elfhames were ignored, so were the petty affairs of mortals. No Sidhe of any Elfhame would have dreamed of interfering in the mortal war raging through the muddy trenches of Europe. Certainly no one from Elfhame Goldengrove committed the utter folly of taking sides in a mortal quarrel. America might at last enter the Great War, but the Sidhe saw no need to do so.

  Then the war ended and for a time the future shone bright as the poppies that flowed over the hills like living gold. Bright and brief as the lives of those flowers; by the time mortal infants born the year the first conflagration ended grew into men and women, the peace bought with human blood had shattered beyond repair. A dark lord rose to lead mankind along the iron road to destruction. A mortal lord, one with no powers save those belonging to mortal men.

  “That frightens me more than all else,” my brother said, as we sat beneath a bent and ancient oak—our new resting place, on the road home from our illicit excursions into the city. Los Angeles grew endlessly; to find a quiet spot well past the city where we could stop and study recently acquired treasures, could safely banish the glamourie that ensured mortals saw us only as prosaically mundane as they themselves, we had to travel farther and farther from what had once been a city square of hard-packed earth. However, we had achieved a change-place at last, and now my brother stared at the headlines on the first page of the Los Angeles Times we had bought at the bus stop.

  “Let me see it again, Din.” I held out my hand, and my brother Dinendal surrendered the newspaper. I spread it out on the ground before me and stared at a photograph of German troops rolling through the streets of Vienna. Crowds of Austrians lined the road; the men and women smiled, waved flags and flowers. An overnight, bloodless annexation and Chancellor Hitler had proclaimed Austria to be rightfully a part of the German Fatherland.

  “The Austrians seem happy to see them,” I said as I gazed at the photograph, and Dinendal replied, “That is what frightens me.”

  “It’s nothing to do with us.” Only what any Sidhe would say. Mortal quarrels were meaningless to the Sidhe. What men did to one another in the World Above was not our concern.

  “No? I hope you’re right, sister dear.” Dinendal reached out. “Give it back; I want to read the rest of the story.”

  “Not until I read the funny pages,” I said, and paged through until I found the pages printed with the adventures of such stalwart heroes as Prince Valiant, Tarzan, and Krazy Kat. Feeling the pressure of my brother’s eyes, I sighed and looked up, to find him regarding me with eyes that seemed, suddenly, to burn blood and fire. For a breath I thought he Saw, Scryed out a future in my face. Then I realized I saw only the setting sun mirrored in his gem-bright eyes.

  “What?” I asked, and after a moment Dinendal said, “By all means, my dear sister, finish the funny pages first. It’s only what the rest of the country is doing, after all.”

  I let that pass, more interested in the escapades of the denizens of Dogpatch than in politics—particularly mortal politics. Sidhe politics were best avoided; mortal politics were mere trivia, best ignored. That was a vital part of Goldengrove’s creed, and as yet I had no reason to examine that belief.

  Nor did there seem any reason to trouble myself over events so far away, when so many fascinating things happened here in my own domain: Hollywood.

  “The Dream Factory,” it was called, and it really was. Without one touch of magick, using only their own wits and hands, mortals created movies. Dreams made visible. There was no better place to be, for Elvenborn or for mortal man and maid, than the movie theaters studding the City of Angels like diamonds.

  Palaces, many of them were named, and palaces they truly were, ornate and costly as any High King’s dwelling. Within their gilded walls, mortals slipped away from the day’s toil, grief, or heat. Enter the Palace of Dreams and forget all else while film scrolled through projector and images danced down a beam of light onto the screen spread before you. Silver holds magic; perhaps that explains the sorcery the movies wove. Silver created the film that stored enchantment forever. Silver created gold, for Hollywood’s movies were one of America’s treasures, a product demanded across the world, a product generating millions of dollars for those who owned the means to create such magic.

  It was less than even a human lifetime since the first flickers had wavered across tiny screens in darkened rooms. An infant born the year Sortie des usines Lumière drew an audience of thirty-three curiosity-seekers into its orbit was only forty-four years old during that brief span of mortal time that came to be called, by those who love the movies, “The Wonder Year.”

  1939.

  The year the Dream Factory produced more great films than it ever had before or ever would again.

  Ninotchka and Stagecoach. Destry Rides Again and Midnight. Gunga Din and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The Women, The Wizard of Oz, and Wuthering Heights.

  Gone With the Wind.

  The movies must have held magick; how else explain the lure the silver screen held even for me? Pure High Court Sidhe, born and bred in the cool world that dwelt Underhill, I should have been immune to the tawdry temptations of the World Above.

  But I was not immune, nor was my brother. Perhaps, as the only two who had been born in Goldengrove itself, we were bound to the New World and its ways as our elders were not.

  Or perhaps we were simply the first to be raised when the mortals’ toys at last became too enticing for even Elvenborn to ignore.

  So, 1939—the year I spent uncounted hours gazing at images sliding across a movie screen. Nor did I realize, then, just how prophetic a path that year’s movies blazed. Looking over their titles, now, they seem to bid farewell to the past and foretell the moral struggles the world faced. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Of Mice and Men. The Four Feathers. Beau Geste. Dark Victory. On Borrowed Time. Only Angels Have Wings.

  When Atlanta burned, and the gates that had once guarded Kong Island fell into fiery ruin behind the small struggling figures of Rhett and Scarlett, it later seemed that fire took everything of the past down into those flames.

  Much later.

  In December 1939, I simply sat, mesmerized by the spectacle that had been called—before the first box office receipts were counted—Selznick’s Folly. I didn’t realize that each watcher gleaned different gems from the same film. My brother saw different things in movies than I did. It was the glorious studio films that drew me; they were the reason I sat through the antics of cartoon mice, the pious instruction in geography, the marching newsreels. For my brother, my mirror, it was the clutter filling the screen before the features that entranced him now.

  Dinendal had been claimed by a drug more dangerous than chocolate or caffeine.

  An interest in mortal affairs.

  * * *

  We had just sat—again—through a showing of Gone with the Wind, and decided to walk all the way back through Los Angeles rather than taking trolley or bus or taxi. Rather, Dinendal decided we would walk home through the vivid neon city and then under the gem-bright stars. He wanted to talk—and not about the movie.

  Dinendal wanted to talk about mortal politics.

  At first, as he began speaking of treaties and troop movements, I thought he was talking about a film. “That’s odd,” I said, interrupting something about Polish hussars. “War films are box office poison.”

  “War film— Don’t you realize what’s going on in Europe?” my brother asked, and I stared at him.

  “Mortal quarrels,” I said. “Don’t you realize there’s an advance screening of the new Carole Lombard movie in Glenwood tomorrow? Shall we go—” I stopped, for Dinendal was looking at me as if I were a very small and very foolish creature. A squirrel, perhaps, or a particularly scatterbrained Low Court Sidhe.

  “Tomorrow I’m leaving for England,” Dinendal said, and I will always remember that when he said that, I laughed.

  “And how will you get there? On an iron boat? Don’t be foolish, Din.”

  “I’m riding Daydream.” That was Din’s elvensteed, named after Sir Percy Blakeney’s yacht.

  “But why?” I was baffled; Sidhe did not interfere in mortal affairs.

  “Because they need every man they can get.”

  “You’ll never be granted permission to go,” I said, still puzzled, still half convinced this was one of Din’s jokes.

  “I know. That’s why I’m not asking permission.” He set his hands upon my shoulders and made me look into his eyes. “I don’t expect you to understand, Helainesse, although I’d hoped you would. It’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.”

  I couldn’t imagine why he was quoting Ronald Colman’s last words in A Tale of Two Cities. “But how will I get news of you? How will I know if you’re all right?”

  “I’ll write you a letter,” Dinendal said. “You know, those things that are always getting lost in the movies, or falling into the wrong hands and causing incredible problems?”

  “This isn’t a movie, Din,” I said. “You aren’t Captain Blood or—or Robin Hood.”

  “No, this isn’t a movie. This is real life. That’s—”

  “But it’s not our real life. It’s mortal life. What does it matter what they do to one another?”

  “Helainesse, haven’t you learned anything from all the hours we’ve spent watching the movie shows? Hasn’t what’s happening in Europe made any impression on you at all?”

  “It’s a war,” I said. “There was a mortal war over there before, and you didn’t think you had to go fight in that one.”

  “That was different,” Dinendal said, and something in his voice sounded soft and familiar; wistful. Only later, when he was gone, did I realize my brother had spoken with the elegiac self-knowledge of the characters portrayed by Din’s favorite actor, Leslie Howard. The Scarlet Pimpernel; Professor Higgins; Ashley Wilkes.

  “I don’t see why it’s different.”

  “Because of why and how it is being fought. The Nazis will never stop, they must fight or die. And they destroy all who are not as they would have them be. The Jews were only the first on Hitler’s list. It doesn’t stop with his ethnic prejudices. Writers, painters, scientists—the great minds of Europe. Think of the imaginations lost, if the Nazis emerge victorious. And sooner or later, if they are not stopped, they will turn their attention to the Sidhe.”

  “Mortals don’t know about us,” I declared, and Dinendal laughed.

  “Herr Schicklgrüber does, or will. He—”

  “Who?”

  My brother sighed. “Hitler. Don’t you know he’s obsessed with ‘the Occult?’ He seeks the Spear of Longinus, the Cauldron of Cerridwen, the Holy Grail. Should his armies win this war, he will certainly seek until he either finds us or drives us Underhill for so long as his Reich endures. So don’t say this isn’t our fight, Helainesse. This is everybody’s fight.”

  For a time, neither of us spoke. At last I said, “But what will you do?”

  “Whatever I can. Against darkness, we all do what we must, little sister. Here, take this—it’s the key to your post office box. Farewell.”

  We had reached our outpost oak, and Daydream stood waiting. Dinendal handed me a small brass key, and kissed my forehead before he mounted Daydream.

  That was the last time I saw Dinendal, as he rode off into his short future. For Sidhe are long-lived, but we can be killed, if someone tries hard enough. And someone did.

  Much, much later I pieced enough of Dinendal’s life in the SOE together to produce a story that held a certain coherent plausibility, an iron logic.

  In London, Din met with Sainemelar, leader of the rogue Elfhame Moonfleet. Sainemelar’s mission was to recruit Sidhe to aid the Allies; even before the war had truly begun, Sainemelar had foreseen what would come to pass, and begun to spin plots of his own. Perhaps Sainemelar, like Dinendal, had watched too many movies, been infected by their insidious sweet venom. Human honor should have meant nothing to either of them.

  For the first time in centuries, a Sidhe returned to England, founded an Elfhame there. Sainemelar sent messages to all the Elfhames, seeking those willing to aid the beleaguered Allies against the iron might of the Axis. Sidhe who had accepted the belief that the war against Nazi Germany was everyone’s war left their own hames and swore fealty to Moonfleet. It was Sainemelar who introduced Din to William Stephenson, the man code-named “Intrepid.”

  A complete pragmatist, William Stephenson accepted the knowledge that elves existed and wished to enlist in the struggle to free Europe from the evil engulfing it with one simple question: “What powers do you have?” Upon learning that Sidhe could set a glamourie upon beings and objects, ken one item into many, force others to see what the Sidhe wished them to see, Stephenson promptly accepted Moonfleet’s offer. The fact that Sidhe never slept delighted him. What wonders could an agent who never needed sleep not accomplish?

  That Sidhe could not touch iron, and so found it difficult, if not impossible, to ride in cars or airplanes, was a drawback. An even greater drawback was their inability to handle guns or knives. But SOE circumvented this problem, producing guns and blades made of new materials. Iron was no longer a necessity. As for the problem of transport by plane—that the Sidhe themselves circumvented.

  Upon the next moonless night, the first cell of Moonfleet operatives rode their elvensteeds across the Channel to Occupied France.

  My brother Dinendal was one of them.

  * * *

  There’s an old adage that says no battle plan survives its first contact with the enemy. In the case of the Moonfleet brigade, the original plan would have worked, except for the lack of one fatal piece of information.

  The Unseleighe Court had decided to play too.

  My brother and his comrades rode over the Narrow Sea; rode the River Seine through the heart of Occupied France to Paris. Moonfleet One remained there, to work with the Paris Underground. The others journeyed on, east to the heart of the growing darkness.

  To Berlin.

  Dinendal rode with Moonfleet Two. No mortal eyes saw lords of the Sidhe pass by; those clever enough to notice them at all saw S.S. officers trotting past on horses black as the uniforms their riders wore. Horses were still used as a mode of transport, even then—and no one but the Gestapo would dare hinder or question the Death’s Heads.

  Outside Berlin, Moonfleet Two slowed, slipping into the world’s time once more. Unlike their comrades who had stopped in Paris, they did not change the glamour they wore. Sidhe pride and beauty made a good foundation for the disguise—and in wartime Berlin, S.S. officers were a privileged class. Watched by passersby with both envy and fear, my brother and his comrades rode up Unter den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate.

  There they were to disperse, head for their individual assignments. A squad of S.S. officers on horseback would ride through the broad gate; lowly civilians on bicycles and soldiers on foot would emerge on the other side. Dinendal, in the seeming of a head clerk, was to go to Gestapo Headquarters. Din had studied the man’s photographs carefully, practiced assuming the man’s features swiftly and accurately. The others had similar assignments. And once within whatever bureau or department they had been allotted, they would gather information when and how they could. Troop movements, factory outputs. Train schedules.

  And whenever the time and place seemed propitious, they were to assume the seeming of the Leader himself. That Hitler had many doubles to confuse enemies as to his true whereabouts was an open secret. Now that ruse could be turned against him.

  No one would question the presence of Der Führer—no matter where he chose to appear. No one would question Der Führer’s order—no matter how bizarre that order might seem to be.

  But that brilliant play was never made. My brother’s group reached the Brandenburg Gate, and passed through it. And as they walked through, their glamouries shimmered, faded like mist from a chilled mirror. They emerged to face a smiling Lord of the Unseleighe Court clad in Gestapo grey, and a squad of S.S. men who opened fire with machine guns.

  Half of Moonfleet Two fell then; iron bullets will kill anything. They were the fortunate ones. The rest were taken prisoner, trapped by Unseleighe magic and held by nets of iron chain.