by Russell Hugh McConnell
Back in Ordberg, it’s easy to sneer at the elves. Everybody does it. In Ordberg everyone knows that elves are overrated snobs, that their magic isn’t as powerful as everyone says, that their art isn’t any more beautiful, that their wine doesn’t taste any better, and so on. And if you keep saying the same thing over and over again, and everyone you meet always agrees with you, it becomes virtually impossible not to believe it.
But now that I’m here in the Dendropalacium, I feel unworthy. All I can think about is the impure blood roiling uneasily in my veins. Under normal circumstances, the faintest trace of human ancestry would be enough to keep me forever excluded from this place – and the last elf in my family line was four generations back.
The main archway of the Elvish palace is in itself an almost unimaginably intricate masterpiece of living sculpture, woven of thin branches and delicate green leaves tipped in honeydew gold. Beyond the archway is the Great Hall, which is even harder to describe: a grand passageway lined with statues of living oak, the smooth tree-trunk walls stretching upwards so high that the ceiling is lost in golden mist. Clean, natural light permeates everywhere, but it is impossible to identify its source. The air is fresh and sweet. As I am led deeper and deeper into the building, each new room, hallway, and work of art makes it impossible to doubt that the elves do in fact have something of a monopoly on the best parts of civilization. I am particularly struck by the tapestries: the almost unimaginably intricate networks of green and gold and silver, woven together to produce astonishingly vivid and lifelike images of Elvish life. I hate to admit it, but I can see why they are so protective of this place, and of their bloodlines.
It took a murder to get me in here.
When the invitation came, Ulgard, my assistant, urged me to turn it down. The elves have always rejected me, so why should I do them any favors now? Although I knew he had a point, his opinion was tinged with bias. As a goblin, he hates elves on general principle. And anyway, the moment I heard the offer I knew I couldn’t turn down the chance to come here. I just couldn’t. I had to see the place I had never been good enough for, the place my great-great-grandmother’s passionate indiscretion had barred me from.
Now, accompanied by my escort, Valerius, I’m deep inside the Dendropalacium in the sacred space of the Locus Gustans—the Tasting Room—because this is where Sacristan Daanilo was found dead two days ago.
“I am told that there are greater detectives than you in Ordberg,” says Valerius in strongly accented Common. It sounds kind of like someone speaking through a flute. “But because of your bloodline you are the only one for whom even this special dispensation could be possible.” I know it’s true. Yesterday, when Valerius contacted me, I was so insecure that I attempted to present him with a genealogical document confirming my ancestry, feeling like a sycophantic student trying to win the headmaster’s approval, but he waved it away without even looking at it. He informed me that my attenuated heritage was evident in the shade of my eyes, the shape of my ears, the smell of my skin, and a dozen other ways. He said it so sadly, as if he were looking at the polluted waters of the Flusswash as they passed out of Ordberg and recognizing traces of the pure mountain spring from whence they had first come. His ageless dawn-grey eyes seemed as though they could see everything.
He turns those eyes on me now. “You have been allowed to enter this place only by order of the Prince. It is not my preference.”
“I understand,” I say. And I truly do. Not for a second do I feel as though I deserve to be here. “Will I meet the Prince?”
“You will not.”
“Ah. Okay.”
“The Prince may not meet with an Immundus. Even if you were a half-blood, he could not meet you. And as it is—"
“Message received. Filthy, degenerate bloodline, tainted by humanity. Got it.” I try to sound casual and dismissive, but I know I fail.
Valerius does not react to my tone. I wonder if he even hears it. He just turns back to the tasting table, and thus to the business at hand. “He was our Master Sommelier. It is a position of high honor.”
“I understand,” I say.
“No,” he replies. “You cannot.”
“Good to know.”
Again, he ignores my attitude. “He was also my closest friend. For nearly three hundred years. You cannot imagine a friendship so long and so deep. And you cannot imagine the palate he had! Superlative, even among our people. His death came at the final stages of this year’s Vinritus. Do you know what that is?”
“The wine contest,” I say. “To judge which Vintner has produced the finest wine this year.”
He winces. “The trivializing word ‘contest’ is an insult to the ritual. But I suppose it will have to do.” He gestures at a tabletop of impossibly smooth, polished oak, and I stare at it even though there is nothing to see. “The key to Elvish winemaking is light. The grapes are important, of course, but the crucial component is the type of light that gets mingled with the vintage at the apex of fermentation.”
“Three varieties,” I say, “Sunlight, Moonlight, and Starlight.”
He raises his eyebrows slightly. “Again, your linguistic limitations prevent deep understanding. But yes, that is essentially right. Sacristan Daanilo was in here alone with the final three samples, the best wine in each category.”
“Where is his body?”
“Sacristan Daanilo’s mortal shell has been removed to the Locus Terminus. You will not be permitted to see it.”
“I might need to.”
He shakes his head. “The Royal Physician has already examined it. She has identified a souring of the blood, which caused a cessation of vitalic functions.”
“So…he was poisoned?”
He looks down at the floor where Daanilo’s body had lain. “It appears so,” he says.
I nod. “I will need to see the wine.”
He gave me a look of total disgust. “Why?” he demands.
I close my eyes wearily. “In order to determine which of the wines was poisoned.”
He looks pained, as though he is approaching the very end of his very long and generous patience. “The Vinritus is sacred. It bears no resemblance to the profane human practice of guzzling alcohol. With this death, the ritual has been disrupted in a way that violates at least six of the ancient Laws. The samples were destroyed.”
Valerius is making me feel like scum, and he’s honestly not even trying to. Feeling put upon, I indulge my all-too-human instincts and lash out weakly at an elf who has just lost his best friend of three centuries. “Why don’t you use your own detectives?” I ask. “If I’m so inadequate?”
“We have no detectives,” says Valerius, “because we have no crime. No murder.”
I give him a hard look. “You do now.” My words are supposed to sound tough, but instead they hang in the air like sadness.
#
I interview the three Vintners one at a time in the antechamber outside the Locus Gustans, with Valerius acting as interpreter. He does not wait for me to finish sentences before beginning to translate, apparently having no difficulty in speaking and listening at the same time.
My first interviewee is Lady Astra of Taranal, Vintner of Starlight. She wears a burgundy chiton and cloak, her white hair is long and fine, and her eyes resemble two glimmering white stars. When she casts her gaze around the room, I could swear that tiny specks of light dance across the walls and ceiling.
I’m not an idiot. I don’t ask her if she poisoned the wine. The Ordberg police would ask that, but unlike them, I’m not paid to ask pointless questions and antagonize people. I manage to antagonize her anyway.
“Was your wine unattended at any point? Could someone have slipped something into it?”
She curls her lip slightly, which I suspect is an expression of disdain. “It does not matter whether it was attended,” she replies, with Valerius interpreting. If his voice is like a flute, hers is more like a dozen tiny pipes warbling in near-unison. “It is impossible to poison true Elvish wine. The valoan humors are inherently vitalic, at least for our people. It simply cannot be done.”
“But could there perhaps be some magical means? Some highly skilled mage—”
Elves do not roll their eyes. But when they tilt their heads backwards and forwards it means much the same thing. “That is absurd. The very concept of ‘mage’ is hopelessly human. We have no ‘mages.’ We do no ‘magic.’ We have Art and we have Craft. That is all.”
“But could a highly skilled craftsperson—”
She waves her hand. “The question is stupid. Worse, it is incoherent.”
I try a different approach. “I’m sure your Craft surpasses any wine I’ve ever had.” I’m trying to flatter her, to placate her in the hopes that she will keep talking to me. But this turns out to be the wrong thing to say.
Her star-eyes grow cold and distant, and the flutelike piping of her voice somehow darkens. “No one who has even a trace of non-Elvish blood could possibly have a good enough palate to appreciate my wine,” she says.
“Oh, uh, I wasn’t asking for a sample—” But it’s too late. She simply turns and walks out of the room.
“Um, can you bring her back?” I ask Valerius. He just shakes his head. As a Vintner, she outranks him, and he cannot tell her what to do.
My next interviewee is Lord Sorin of Antiman, Vintner of Sunlight. His hair is as long as Lady Astra’s, and just as fine. His garments are identical to hers, except that instead of being burgundy they are light yellow. His eyes are golden. I’ve heard of people who light up rooms when they enter them, and I always thought it was just a metaphor, but Lord Sorin literally illuminates the room as he enters. I’ve never seen anything like it.
To my relief, he is friendlier than Lady Astra, although when I ask him about unattended wine he gives essentially the same answer. “Outsider,” he says, in a warm voice, closer to a violin than to flutes or pipes, “there have been long stretches of time when my vintage was not under surveillance. But this does not matter. There is no Art or Craft known to me by which true Elvish wine might be poisoned.”
I get an idea. “But what if the wine were untrue? Impure, I mean? What if someone contaminated it with lesser wine? Non-Elvish wine? Would that then make it possible to introduce poison?”
I am starting to get used to the looks of horror and dismay that my questions provoke. Lord Sorin gives me one now. “Why on the sacred earth would anyone do such a terrible thing?”
“A terrible thing? Are you referring to murdering someone with poison? Or making a blended wine?” I mean it as an ironic jab at Elvish moral standards, but he takes me seriously.
“Both, of course. Murder is an unthinkable crime among our people, and the corruption of wines is nearly as depraved as the corruption of blood.”
“How about an experiment?” I ask recklessly, even though I know even as I am speaking that this will probably get me nowhere. I’m off my game, and I’m handling this whole thing badly. “If you still have some of your vintage left—"
I thought he might get angry, but instead he puts a golden hand to his lips and regards me with such deep, sincere concern that I stop talking at once. “My dear child,” he says, “you are not intending to drink any of it yourself, are you?”
I sigh. “No, I am aware that doing so would be against your laws. Besides, I am told that anyone with even a trace of non-Elvish blood couldn’t possibly have the palate to appreciate it, and my dirty blood is only one-sixteenth Elvish, so…”
“Not only that,” he says, his open face radiating a solicitousness so genuine that I cannot even get angry about how condescending it is, “in certain cases it could even be fatal. The specific blend of refined luminescence and valoan humors, in combination with merely human blood…” He shakes his head. “I would not recommend it.”
“Are there any rivalries or resentments around here that I should know about?” I ask, feeling desperate. “Look, maybe it’s impossible to poison Elvish wine, for all kinds of complicated reasons to do with refined humors and whatnot. But you know what? I’m an Immundus. I’m a simpleton. I like simple, plain facts. One simple plain fact is that Sacristan Daanilo has been poisoned. Another simple plain fact is that somebody did it.”
At this moment, Lord Sorin’s whole body starts trembling. I freeze, unsure of what this means. Then a gleaming tear runs down his face. A moment later, Valerius is hustling him out of the room, speaking to him in rapid Elvish that I feel sure must be apologies for his having to endure the unpleasantness of speaking with horrible me.
The two of them are gone for several minutes, and I pace impatiently, but eventually Valerius returns with my third interviewee. Lady Esmeray of Amaris, Vintner of Moonlight, has short raven-black hair and snow-white skin, and wears a chiton and cloak of ocean blue. Her eyes are bright and flat, like two silver coins.
“My understanding,” I say to her, “is that Elvish wine cannot be poisoned by any means.”
To my surprise, she answers in Common, obviating the need for Valerius to interpret. Her voice sounds like sea waves lapping a patch of sandy shore in a limestone cavern. It is so soft that I have to strain to hear. “Your understanding is true,” she says.
“I know that my language is inadequate for capturing the nuances of your culture,” I say carefully, “and I hope you will excuse any crudity. But is it correct to say that the Vinritus is in some sense a contest?”
“I suppose it is, in a sense,” she says. “But we do not compete against one another; we compete against the limits of our Craft.”
“If it is a contest of sorts, then is there not the possibility of rivalry? Resentment? Ill-feeling between competitors?”
“No,” comes the single-word answer, as light as a wisp of sea-foam.
“You hold the Vinritus every year, don’t you? For how long have you, Lady Astra, and Lord Sorin been the chief participants?”
“Lord Sorin has produced the preeminent Sunlight wine for the last one hundred and thirty-seven years. Lady Astra has produced the preeminent Starlight wine for the last two hundred and eighty-eight years. And I have produced the preeminent Moonlight wine for the last six hundred and forty years.”
I stare open-mouthed for a moment. Although I had additional questions in mind, something about speaking to elf aristocracy makes it hard for me to remember things clearly, and in the case of Lady Esmeray the effect is tenfold. After a full minute of silence, all I can think of to say is, “So far you are the only person I have interviewed who has not informed me that my impure blood makes me unfit to drink Elvish wine.”
She says nothing, presumably because I have asked nothing. But even in her wordlessness I feel as though I can hear the waves of a dim, underground sea.
“Um,” I say, “what do you think happened to Sacristan Daanilo? Why did he die?”
“The sky turns eternally, and the moon rises and falls,” she says.
I definitely had other questions, but I no longer remember them. I mumble something about how I appreciate her time, and she seems to float out of the room without really moving.
After she leaves, Valerius is pale with anger. “I feel filthy for even repeating your blasphemous and offensive questions,” he says as harshly as his flute-voice will allow. “You might as well have thrown your own excrement at them.”
“I guess excrement-throwing is my job today,” I say, “given that you mustn’t soil your lily-white hands with anything. Least of all a dirty truth. Because something is rotten around here.”
After Valerius leaves, I pace back and forth in the now-empty antechamber. I wish Ulgald were here. It helps to bounce ideas off him, but there’s no way they’d have let me bring him with me. In fact, I figure they don’t know that I work with a goblin, or the Prince's special dispensation would probably not have been granted..
So I have to use my imagination. I close my eyes and picture my dingy office on Candlewick Street, so far removed from the grandeur and elegance of the Dendropalacium. I murmur subvocally, imagining that I am speaking with my usual loud confidence – a confidence that is virtually impossible to muster in the crushingly beautiful Elvish palace. “I’ve got three obvious suspects. All of them are good at avoiding questions. Lady Astra is cold. Possibly capable of envy and resentment? Lord Sorin is not cold; he seems the most empathetic of the three. That weeping fit of his seemed genuine – but could it have been a tactic for cutting off a dangerous line of questioning? And Lady Esmeray…I feel that she was direct with me, but I can hardly remember anything she said. And the big, fat problem that I keep coming back to is that it’s apparently impossible to poison Elvish wine. The way this case is shaping up, there’s only two possibilities. Either nobody poisoned the Sacristan, or else everybody…”
I trail off. There’s something here. Something that’s been right in front of my face this whole time. Isn’t that always the way?
“Either nobody poisoned him,” I say aloud, forgetting to murmur. “Or else everybody is telling the same lie.”
Most of my job consists of chasing lies. Chasing them down alleyways, through grand mansions, across busy streets, down into cellars and sewers, up trees and towers, into people’s homes. Lies run every which way, and I—lucky me—get to spend my professional life following them. If there’s one thing I have learned from this grubby business, it’s that people never manage to all tell the exact same lie. And yet…
“Nobody poisoned him,” I whisper.
#
If you keep saying the same thing over and over again, and everyone you meet always agrees with you, it becomes virtually impossible not to believe it. All of these elves have been saying the same thing for three hundred years. It never occurred to them to question it, because it was obviously true. Except it wasn’t.
I’m in the antechamber with Valerius, Lady Astra, Lord Sorin, and Lady Esmeray. None of them looks happy to be here. But when I told them that I had solved the mystery, they all came.
“Right from the start, I assumed that the wine was poisoned,” I say. “You all told me that this was impossible, but I clung to it as the only idea that made sense. But you were right. The wine was not poisoned.” I look at the row of faces, impossibly beautiful, incredibly distant. “But although the wine wasn’t poisoned, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t poisonous.”
Four Elvish heads tilt backwards and forwards. They are not impressed.
“I have a theory. The proof of it can be found in Sacristan Daanilo’s body.”
“I told you before,” says Valerius, “you cannot see it.”
“I don’t need to see it. It wouldn’t do any good if I did. I need the Royal Physician to examine his blood.”
“I told you; she has already done so. She found that his blood had soured.”
“No doubt she did. But she wasn’t looking for the right thing.” I take a step towards them, and look at each face in turn. “She needs to do a different test. She needs to determine whether the blood of Sacristan Daanilo is purely Elvish. I believe she will find that it is not.”
They all stare at me.
It is Lord Sorin who speaks first, and there is a brief delay before Valerius remembers that he is supposed to interpret. “He performed three centuries of service as Sacristan. If his bloodline was nearly pure, then a fatal abreaction to the valoan humors would be highly improbable, because only a very precise combination of elements could possibly precipitate it. The chance of any one vintage being fatal could not possibly be more than one in five thousand. But in the long run, such an abreaction would be inevitable.”
There is a long silence that stretches to a full minute, then two minutes, then three.
It is Lady Esmeray who gently breaks the silence, her voice like waves on soft sand under the non-light of a new moon. “I believe we now know the truth. The Royal Physician may reexamine the blood to confirm this hypothesis. But then the mortal shell of Sacristan Daanilo must be removed from the Locus Terminus.”
Valerius lowers his head.
#
A heavy drizzle has started, the raindrops resentfully battering the muddy ground. Valerius and I stand in the great living archway. He has offered his formal thanks for my service, handed me the pouch of gemstones that was my promised payment, and informed me that I will never enter the Dendropalacium again.
“I told you that we had no murder,” he adds.
“I should have believed you,” I say. Then I hesitate before asking the question that is burning in my mind. “Do you think he knew that he was a— that he was not of pure Elvish blood?” I ask. Although earlier Valerius felt free to toss the word “Immundus” at me, somehow it feels unfair to toss it back now. Ulgald would say that I’m being weak.
“We will never know,” said Valerius. “Could he knowingly have kept this secret from me for three centuries? A part of me would like to deny it. But he could have. If he did, he must have known the risk he was taking in serving as Sacristan. So perhaps he did not know his bloodline. Or else he thought it was worth risking death each year to be so highly honored among us.”
The two of us stand for a minute watching the rain. “A tapestry is a robust form of art,” he whispers, barely audible above the rain, “but it is also the most delicate.”
I think I might see where he’s going with this.
“A good tapestry,” he continues, “can remain whole and beautiful for centuries – millennia even. But if you tug on one loose thread, the whole thing can begin to unravel.” He continues to gaze at the rain, refusing to look at me. “ Who knows what terrible unraveling you have initiated today? If Sacristan Daanilo was impure, any of us might be doubted. What will become of the Vinritus, now that an Immundus has served as Sacristan? An Immundus whose palate we regarded as supreme? What will become of our rituals? What will become of our trust for one another?” He sighs – a long, mournful flutelike note – and turns to look at me with those dawn-grey eyes and says, without a shred of hostility, “I wish that you had never come.”
Feeling that any reply would be wrong, I just walk away without a backwards glance. I squelch along the muddy path through Gallwood Forest towards the Westway, away from the Elvish realm and back towards the cold, grimy city that is my rightful home, where the air is foul, and nothing is beautiful.
© Copyright 2025 Russell Hugh McConnell
About the Author
Toronto, Canada is where Russell Hugh McConnell started his story: a tarnished knight in a fedora, stalking the rain-slicked streets of this fallen world. Over the years, his investigations have taken him to many cities across North America, both real and imaginary, where he frequents the seediest gin joints and lurks in neon-lit parking lots outside the corrupt corridors of power, bumming cigarettes off the wiseguys and dragon-ladies. He's made plenty of enemies, so right now he's lying low in North Texas, waiting for things to blow over. He has no social media accounts (they bring too much heat) but if you need him, you can find him skulking in the dark corners of speculative fiction anthologies like Dragonesque, Familiars, Last-Ditch, Achilles, and Aphrodite.