“I will speak of this to my daughter. She will be amused.”
“And the Human Princeling?”
“What of it? It no longer hunts in our realm.”
“He wars against you,” I argued.
“The war is not your concern. It will end soon, before it truly begins.”
“It has already begun,” I said angrily, “and you’re losing.”
The Cull spoke.
“We have dreamed of the war. You are right. If there the war between the Fair peoples and the Horsemen goes on, the Fair peoples will lose.”
“What?” I twisted to look at the Cull. I recalled the battles I’d witnessed or heard of. Each time, the Vampires had been cut to pieces. She had watched those battles as well.
“Do not speak of such in front of animals,” the robed Vampire warned. There was a nervous shifting of the Vampires around us, but they remained silent.
“Doom upon us all if the war comes,” the Cull said. “Not even the Traditional people will make a difference. Best to avoid the war.”
“You surrender?” I asked. “You think you’ll be safe with their boots on your necks? The Horsemen are wolves, they know no mercy.”
“Not surrender,” the Cull replied. “We make peace. We agree not to kill each other. It is a thing that real people do. Rughk would not understand.”
“The Horsemen will kill you. They kill as they wish.”
“They cannot kill all,” the Cull told the audience, “they have been shown that. They hesitate, uncertain of their power.”
Khanstantin, I realized, with a moment of insight. Khanstantin’s band had changed things. Their entry into the battle had changed everything. It had stolen the Horsemen’s confidence.
The Horsemen and Dwarves might war against the Vampires and win. But what about the other Kingdoms? Who would win if the Goblin Mothers entered the war?
What had the Kobolds said so long ago? There’d been peace bought by the Dwarves with the Kobold’s Secret Kingdom, to keep it from the war. The Dwarves and Horsemen wanted to limit it, to keep the war from spilling its banks, and drowning them all.
“All the Horsemen want is living space,” the robed Vampire offered, as if acquiescing in the Cull’s words. “We will give it to them and they will be peaceful with us. They are our brothers who ride. They won’t fight us. We won’t fight them. Without the Horsemen, the Dwarves lack strength. They will abandon their war.”
“And the Prince?”
“He is in their house. They may deal with their Prince on their own. Sooner or later they must see him for what he is.”
I snarled deep down in my throat. My lips parted to show the beginnings of heavy canines.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked them, turning from the Cull to the Thundering Dawn Vampire. “Why did you listen to my story?”
“Because you came to tell it,” the seated Vampire replied easily. “Stories are told. Did you imagine that we should be ruled by a tale told by an Uruch. Your words are only sound and fury, signifying nothing more than meaningless emptiness.”
“Blood is spilled!”
“That is the way of blood.”
“Cowards,” I spat.
Even as I said the word, I knew it was a terrible mistake. His face turned to stone. He made a gesture, and I heard sudden rustling around me.
“I will say this: When I found the body I was mad with grief, and I made it known that no more of our folk should die like this. Were I still ruled by such grief I might cast the stones of war, heeding no consequences.”
“Then why...” I began, but he cut me off.
“Vengeance,” he said irritably, “revenge, anger, hatred, lust, there is nothing inside you. You are without soul, and your death will not matter, even to you. But it is not your fault, what you are. You have done me a small service, I shall do you a small one.”
Death.
I froze, glancing around at the Vampires. My heart started to pound as I tried to guess which one would move first, which way I should go.
“She walks away,” the Cull said.
“What?” the Thundering Dawn Vampire seemed startled.
“She lives, for this is the City where nothing may die.”
“Oh yes,” he said, “she is not really alive...”
“She walks away,” the Cull repeated.
“We would remove her from the City. Obviously her blood will not run here.”
“She stands and walks away in my dream. She leaves us unmolested, and continues her journey.”
“Well...” said the robed Vampire, “clearly that’s a metaphorical allusion, it represents-”
“No,” the Cull replied, “it is a literal event, although several meanings may be drawn from it.”
“But,” the robed Vampire argued, the careful shadings of his words vanishing under the weight of frustration, “it has entered forbidden places.”
“I brought it to forbidden places.”
“I has insulted us by its existence, by its presence, and by its words, it has sullied memory and dream and ...”
The Cull sighed loudly.
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“Very well,” the robed Vampire said. He pointedly turned his face from us.
“I will walk for a distance,” the Cull announced, rising with a single smooth motion. “It will follow in my presence.”
It departed in easy steps, the little Arukh and I followed, sweat running down my spine as I stared at her swaying backside. Outside the hall I was surprised to notice that the edge of the sky was light with dawn.
After we’d gone a distance, she spoke.
“Among my own people,” she said, “the true people, the true dreamers, I am considered unbearably gauche. My every breath is one of inappropriate directness, my every word too forward. Too preoccupied with the mundane, too blunt in my speech. I suppose this is why I am a Cull, or perhaps being a Cull has shaped this quality in me.”
“But here, in this city at the end of the world,” she went on, “among these who claim to be Fair People and call us Traditionals, who pretend to dream, it is like speaking to children. One wonders why one even bothers to speak to them?”
“You speak to me,” I said.
She glanced at me.
“A creature might know how to make sounds that resemble words,” she said almost whimsically, “but does it say anything? If it does speak, does it hear its own words? Do you listen when you speak? What do you hear? And if you don’t listen to your own words, are they worth hearing for anyone else?”
She paused.
“Do I speak to you?” she asked. “Or at you?”
I blushed and lowered my head. I could not follow her.
“You have been to the centre of the world?” she asked, changing topic abruptly. “That great place where all life begins, where the herds run and the sky and the land stretches out in all directions?”
I nodded. I vaguely remembered it from long ago, before they had marked and abandoned me.
“I knew it,” she said. “It makes you different from this one.”
She glanced at the little Arukh, who cringed submissively. I made a noise, soft and rumbling in my throat, and stepped between them.
It seemed to amuse the Cull.
Something came together in my mind, a shifting of pieces that seemed to make the beginnings of a picture.
“How many Arukh have you made?” I asked.
She chuckled and looked away.
“Four or five,” she said, “perhaps six. Who counts Rughk?”
She paused. “I have a taste for Goblins. Perverse, I know, but there it is. A small thing really.”
“Am I one of yours?”
She shrugged.
“I do not know, and in any case, the question is
without meaning, except perhaps to Goblins.”
Goblins counted mothers as everything, Vampires hardly counted them at all. Who counted Arukh important? What did Arukh count as important? I wondered.
Did it mean something to her? I didn’t know.
“Arrah!” I snarled at her, turning my face away. “Cull!”
Maker of death, I thought. Well I lived, we lived, despite her and her kind.
“Some of us,” she said, ignoring me, “never leave the centre of the world. We ride there forever, to horizons that stretch away endlessly. And yet, at the edges, there are other things, strange and wondrous things. Sometimes we ask each other, are there other dreamers?”
She looked at me.
“Do you think Rughk dream?”
I could tell she did not need an answer.
“You called me a Cull,” she said, “and this is my title. But you misunderstand. We do not choose the dead.”
She touched me on my forehead, my eyes snapped shut, and I cringed abruptly.
“We choose the living.”
I opened my eyes.
She was gone.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I found myself walking towards the Mermaids’ dock. I abruptly changed direction, and returned to my lodge.
As I stepped through the doorway, a dozen hostile eyes glared at me with suspicion, and then looked away. The meal drums were still beating. I grabbed a piece of rotting meat from another Arukh and slunk to a corner to gnaw on it, occasionally licking off a stray maggot and crushing it between my teeth.
Arukh drifted through, eating, drinking, gambling or fighting. I watched them. We never took our eyes off each other. We never trusted, never relented. We knew exactly what our fellows would do to us, if given the slightest opportunity. We would do it ourselves.
I thought about the Mermaids as I watched my people. I could not imagine a race more unlike us.
I thought about the mad Princeling with his bloody iron knife. Why did I hunger for his death?
Because: He was just like us.
I had seen it in his eyes.
It was madness to pursue him, I realized. He had too much power. Too many Men at his command. I recognized my desire for his blood as a kind of madness.
Madness is the fate of the Arukh.
Still, if I moved carefully, I might see my desires won. I considered my choices. The night people were of no use.
The war was still winding down though, that much was coming clear. Armed parties still roamed the streets and boulevards, and Dwarves still tore down neighbourhoods, built and abandoned checkpoints and fortifications.
But the heart was out of it. There were not clashes and skirmishes. No sudden flurries of blood and fighting.
The Prince still lived. But there were still the Dwarves. They owned the Horsemen, and the mad Prince had ravaged invisibly among their own people. Now, with the war apparently coming to an end, they wouldn’t need the Horsemen so badly.
They would not hesitate to put an end to him.
In the darkness, I grinned running my tongue over heavy fangs.
A Dwarf was busily carving runes into a wooden gate. I knew him. I’d seen him many times before, carving Dwarvish symbols in the market places. I watched him work with stone and metal tools. Other Dwarves bustled back and forth, ignoring us, keeping a wary eye on me. A small band of Totem warriors watched us.
“Small carving,” the Dwarf said suddenly, acknowledging my existence, without quite looking at me.
I grunted.
“In the mountains,” he said, “we carve big. We carved shelters and handholds, ledges. These were the simple things. And we carved the shapes of spirits and stories into living rock. Great carvings to take a lifetime and to last a thousand years.”
“Are you from the mountains?”
“No,” he chuckled, “but I’ve been out there. I’ve seen birds as tall as twenty giants.”
Real birds? I wondered. Or carved shapes etched into the sides of mountains?
“Here,” he said, “practically all the carving is wood. Wood is much faster, but it hardly lasts, and it’s small. Better to carve stone.”
“Why do you carve wood?” I asked.
He stopped and looked at me. His gaze was questioning. Finally, he turned back to his carving, running fingers along gouged wood. As he traced the outlines of his work, I saw stylized birds and goats, representations of Dwarves and Giants.
He seemed to chew his lip, glancing from them to the tools laid out at his feet.
“Some of those mountain carvings...” he said carefully, “aren’t very good.”
I waited.
“I’ve never found a shape I’d want to give my life to,” he said finally, “but when I do, I want to be worthy of it.”
He picked up a small metal tool and began to pick at the work he’d done already.
“I’ve never known a Hagrik to care about carvings,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I’m looking for some Totems,” I told him.
He nodded.
“You’ve come to the right place.”
“I want to speak with someone from White Bear Totem.”
He grunted.
“And Cracking Birds, Snow Leopard,” I continued. “And Blue Ice Foxes.”
He glanced at me.
“What about?”
“Totem business.”
He laughed.
“From Hagrik? What sort of Totem sends Hagrik on it’s business. Not even Short Tailed Cat does that.”
Short Tailed Cat was the totem that controlled Arukh lodges in the Downriver.
“Fish Hawks.”
He stopped, turning to me.
“Fish Hawks aren’t an acknowledged Totem,” he said at last.
I shrugged and tried to look stupid.
“I carry an important message for the White Bear Totem.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. The White Bears are ice traders, Fish Hawks are fishmongers...”
Ice traders?
“It is a very important message,” I repeated stubbornly.
He chewed his lip. The young toughs were watching us with interest, listening.
“What’s the message?”
“It’s about the White Bear Daughter.”
According to the story I’d heard, the last to hold the title of White Bear Daughter had been abducted from the temple seven months ago. They had found the body six months ago. Half of it, anyway. The White Bear Daughter, as far as I could tell, was the highest ranking among the Dwarves who’d been taken. There’d been a storm of outrage, thirty Kobolds had been hung, as many more had been blinded. I was certain though, that she’d been one of the bloody footsteps along the Prince’s trail.
“The Fish Hawks know something about that?” he said slowly.
I nodded.
“And they’ve sent you with the message?” His disbelief was apparent.
“I have a message about the White Bear Daughter,” I repeated.
He laid his tools down.
“What has this to do with me?”
I held up my hand, letting a glint of silver roll through my fingers, out of sight of the toughs.
His eyes held on the silver, and then glanced at the toughs.
“Come back tomorrow, early in the day. Maybe I’ll find someone who’ll pay attention to you.”
I shrugged. He picked up a tool and went back to work on the gate. I left.
I was back the next day with the Little Arukh, waiting. The Carver appeared with the strangest Dwarf I’d ever seen. He was half Dwarf, half wood. His legs and one arm were made of wood. That is, the flesh part of his legs ended, one below the knee and one above, and he’d had wooden pegs fitted so he could walk about. One of his arms seemed to end just a
little past the elbow and he’d fitted a long stick there for balance.
For a moment they jabbered in Mountain argot almost too thick to follow. They glanced at me. I tried to look blank, as if I didn’t understand them.
“Hey Abomination,” the half Dwarf said, “come over here.”
We walked over.
“You have a message?” he asked.
I nodded.
“What is it?”
“It is about the White Bear Daughter.”
“What about the White Bear Daughter?”
“She was killed.”
“And...”
“It is an important message,” I told them.
“Tell me,” he insisted.
“Horsemen killed her.”
The Dwarves glanced nervously at each other. They jabbered some more. I waited patiently. Finally they decided that the White Bear Mother should see me.
“You come with me,” the half Dwarf said. He waved his arm-stick at the little Arukh. “That one stays behind.”
She growled.
I’d have liked to have brought her with me, for safety if nothing else. But in the Dwarf City, one Arukh at my back wouldn’t make a real difference. I grunted and she subsided.
“I’m Foreman,” the half Dwarf said. He noticed me staring at his stick limbs.
“Ice riding,” he said, “spring rushes. Pack shifted. I get along well enough though.”
I had no idea what that meant.
“Arrah,” I grunted, noncommittally.
“Just glad to be alive. I had my doubts there, at first, you know. And I have pains now, it’s not getting easier. But living is worth it.”
“Arrah,” I grunted.
“As you say,” he said.
He led me into the Dwarf City, moving easily on his sticks.
The area we passed through was composed of narrow winding streets, paved with small stones, and thin wooden buildings that seemed to pile one on top of the other in layers. The windows were staggered, no window ever sitting above another window, or a door. I saw one dwarf stick his buttocks out an upper floor and shit in the street.
Foreman half grinned.
“Mountain types,” he said. “Some places have chutes that go all the way down to the basement. But those smell. In my part of the city, we use pots.”
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