Guile of Dragons, A

by James Enge

  Tyr suspected the boy was irrational, although he found it hard to tell with Other Ilk in general and Morlock in particular. He thought about throwing something to knock the boy out and then dragging him out of there somehow. On the other hand, there was some chance that Morlock, crazy or not, knew what he was doing.

  His decision was still taking form when it became irrelevant. The fire vanished with a kind of thunderclap. Tyr crouched, bracing himself against the icy shock that rode the air, re-echoing in the crumbling room. When it passed he looked up to see Morlock slumped against the wall. His right hand and bare feet were frost-blue.

  There were still some small fires burning in the suddenly freezing room: Morlock’s Ambrosial blood setting fire even to the stones it dripped on. But the terrible blaze was gone. Where its center had been, Tyr saw a small dark gem with a fiery red heart: the bloom from Morlock’s seedstone, repatterned—whatever that meant. Tyr pocketed it and went over to Morlock. The boy’s clothes and limbs were in rags. There was a medallion around his neck that Tyr thought he recognized. He looked at it solemnly for a few moments and then reached down and snapped the chain, putting it with the medallion in his pocket alongside the stone. Then he grabbed his bleeding, burning, harven son under the shoulders and dragged him away to the Healing Chambers.

  Vyrlaeth was an unpleasantly lizardlike dwarf with a long gray tongue that he rested thoughtfully between his gray lips when he wasn’t speaking— sometimes, even when he was. He shaved his face, and he knotted his hair like a female. But he was the best healer under Thrymhaiam, and Tyr was glad he was tending to Morlock.

  “Yes, yes,” Vyrlaeth was saying now. “The burns are slighter than one would expect. The heritage of Ambrose. Indeed, the blaze must have been fierce to raise any blisters at all. Most troubling are the blast impacts on his hands and feet, and the frostbite here and there. You must explain to me sometime how the injuries occurred.”

  “As soon as I understand it myself,” Tyr promised.

  “Well.” The gray tongue glistened between the gray lips. A shrug. “It’s the injuries themselves that concern me, of course.”

  “Can you save his hands? He’s a fine maker.”

  “Oh yes. Yes, indeed.” The tongue again. “We will weave the bones, the blood vessels, the tendons and muscles together again. The flesh is wounded, but nothing has died.” The tongue. “Death itself is an interesting problem.” Tongue. “Not unsolvable. Partial death, anyway—tissue death. Necrosis . . . necrosis . . .” He whispered the word as if it were the name of his firstborn daughter.

  “Can I speak to him?” Tyr asked, eager to escape from the sight of the healer’s tongue and his sentimental daydreams of necrosis.

  “Surely.” A gray smooth-skinned smile. “In his moods, he might even answer you.”

  Morlock was lying on a stone sleepbench stripped of its blankets; there was even a stone pillow. The healers were taking no chances with the fires that might arise from Morlock’s burning blood. Tyr couldn’t blame them; the bandages on Morlock’s hands and feet were smoking slightly, even though they were laced with so many fire-quell magics that they made Tyr’s beard bristle like an unhappy badger.

  He sat down beside his strangest son and said, “Morlock. I know you’re awake.”

  “How can I sleep, thinking about the ur-shapes?” Morlock muttered.

  His moods. Some of Morlock’s harven kin thought him insane; Tyr had never agreed, and not just out of loyalty to the boy’s ruthen father. Trying to trust that feeling, Tyr observed quietly, “I don’t know what you mean by ur-shapes, Morlock. What are they and why are they bothering you?”

  Morlock reached out his bandaged hands to take a stylus and slate from a stone table next to his rocky bed.

  “Should you be using those?” Tyr asked anxiously.

  “Vyrlaeth says it doesn’t matter for the reweaving,” Morlock said. He paused and stared off into space for a moment. “Healing is a strange art. Bodies are so unclean. But the patterns are so complex. I think that is a making I will never master.”

  “Ur-shapes,” Tyr reminded him, but Morlock had already turned back to his slate. The shattered, bandaged fingers sketched three elegant shapes with the stylus: a square, a circle, a hexagon.

  “This,” Morlock said, “is three pictures of that.” He pointed at the coldlight lamp standing on the stone table.

  “How so?” Tyr said. Although he thought he understood, he also thought it was a good discipline for Morlock to express his ideas in words.

  “What if we were on the surface of the slate?” Morlock said after a while, “as flat as the slate itself, and could see nothing except what was on the slate?”

  Tyr’s eyes crossed a little; then he smiled and said, “Suppose we were.”

  “Yes, and suppose the lamp passed through the slate somehow. This”—he tapped the slate—“is what we would see: not the true shape, but a series of sections. The square base. The round ring securing the light to the base. The long six-sided coldlight. We might think these were all different things, or that the object was changing shape over time, but it wouldn’t be true. The true shape of the thing would be an ur-shape for us. We could deduce the true shape using our minds and memories, but we could never see it.”

  “And you think . . .”

  “I think we do live on a slate. Or maybe: in a box. There are measurements and dimensions that we don’t see, and, and, and when those shapes pass through our senses we don’t truly see them. We have to understand them. I am saying this badly.”

  “No, I think I follow you. This is the scholium called multidimensional geometry”—he spoke the phrase in Wardic, as there was no exact equivalent in Dwarvish—“by those-who-know.”

  “Oh.” Morlock blinked and shrugged. “I thought I invented it.”

  “You did, it seems. Someone else just did so first. But I don’t see what this has to do with your explosive seedstone.”

  “Oh. That.” Morlock’s face twisted with unhappiness, anger, shame. “We were drawing matrices for seedstones and—Does Naeth know about multidimensional geometry?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Well. I was trying to explain to him about the ur-shapes. Because it matters for the matrices. The matrices apply power to the focus in the heart of the seedstone, creating the bloom of matter, but if you used ur-shapes you could draw different types of matrices. They might apply new levels of power, create new kinds of stone. He—he—wouldn’t listen. So I. So I. So I.”

  “So you completely destroyed the work-chamber and the structural integrity of several walls.”

  “I guess. I need to know more about multidimensional geometry. Can you teach me?”

  “No,” Tyr admitted, “or at least not much. And as far as I know, no one has applied it to seedstone-crafting, so I ask you to tread carefully there. That runaway exothermia was like nothing I have ever seen.”

  Morlock nodded, visibly storing away the new words for later use and thought. “What a disaster,” he reflected, after a long stretch of thoughtful silence.

  “Not altogether,” Tyr said, drawing out the gem from his pocket. The surface was dark red, like a garnet, but there was a deep golden flaw running down to its heart.

  Morlock’s gray eyes glared at the thing with distaste. “You should get rid of it. It is ugly, ill-made, possibly dangerous.”

  Tyr looked mildly on his ugly, ill-made, possibly dangerous son. “I collect such things, though,” Tyr said, “and I don’t lightly get rid of those I’ve become attached to. I’ll keep this, if you don’t mind.”

  “Everything that’s mine is yours,” Morlock said unhesitatingly. Then he hesitated. “But that thing . . . the core may fail. I scripted the repatterning recklessly, not knowing what I was doing. If it is unstable there might be another runaway exothermia . . . or . . . what is the opposite? When things grow colder?”

  “Endothermia, I think.”

  “That, then.”

  “Well, you will study, and
someday perfect the design. I’ll keep this against that day.”

  “Who will teach me?” asked Morlock. He hardly needed to say, Not Naeth, I hope: it was written on his usually inexpressive face.

  “I think to send you south, to New Moorhope. You can learn much of geometry there from those-who-know, and healing, too, if you choose, and many other things.”

  Morlock’s face lost all expression again. “I am to be sent away.”

  “Morlocktheorn. This is an opportunity, not a punishment. You have talent, but not skill. You could have both. Think of this.”

  Morlock nodded in acceptance.

  They talked of some other things, and Tyr rose to go without ever mentioning the other thing he had in his pocket, the medallion he had removed from Morlock’s neck.

  On it was an image of Morlock’s ruthen father, old Ambrosius. Morlock had said something disrespectful about the old man last year, and Tyr had ordered the boy to make this reminder of his first father and wear it for a month. Nothing cast more shame on a harven family than raising a child who scorned their ruthen parents. At first, when he’d seen the medallion still about Morlock’s neck in the burning chamber, Tyr had been relieved: perhaps the lesson was taking root. Then he looked closer.

  The image was defaced: the eyes were gouged out and the rest of the face was slashed into a blur by a thousand or more savage strokes with a variety of tools, blunt and sharp. MERLIN AMBROSIUS had once been inscribed under the face. MERLIN was completely scratched away: a ragged trench took its place on the medallion’s surface. AMBROSIUS was still there, each letter standing alone in a deeply incised square. Tyr’s lesson of respect had been transformed into a talisman of hate.

  The obverse bore an image of Morlock’s mother. It remained untouched. Was that a sign of reverence? Indifference? Tyr could not be sure.

  In fact, the matter was beyond Tyr’s reach and he knew it. In New Moorhope, the greatest center of lore and learning in the Wardlands (perhaps the world, or many a world), there were mindhealers as well as geometers. Should he send Morlock to them, as well?

  But the boy never spoke of it. Whenever he spoke of his ruthen father nowadays, it was with measured respect for old Ambrosius’ achievements, never a word of disrespect. And he rarely spoke of the old man at all. Whatever Morlock felt, he knew it was wrong, and he kept it locked up inside himself. That was good, wasn’t it? It showed he was learning.

  Tyr walked away and went about his work as Eldest of the Seven Clans. He had many things to think about, but Morlock was often on his mind, if never quite in his grasp.

  PART TWO

  UNDER THE GUARD

  Does the eagle know what is in the pit?

  Or wilt thou go ask the mole?

  Can wisdom be put in a silver rod?

  Or love in a golden bowl?

  —Blake, The Book of Thel

  CHAPTER SIX

  Earno Goes North

  Years later, in the hour before dawn, Earno Dragonkiller lay dreaming.

  From his bed he seemed to see red light on the clouds outside his window. He heard the roar of a high wind and the unmistakable crackling of an open fire. He rose from his bed in the dark red light and went to the window. He saw, without surprise, that the city, A Thousand Towers, was burning. The river Ruleijn ran red as blood with reflected light. Turning away from the window, he noticed that beside his bed stood a spiraling stairway, where none had been before. He ascended it without hesitation, and it led him to the roof of his house.

  Casting his gaze about as he reached the roof, he saw instantly that the fire had gutted Tower Ambrose, ancient home of the Ambrosii. He watched with some satisfaction as it collapsed into a smoky glowing ruin. But as it fell the horizon itself gave way and he surveyed all the Wardlands at a glance.

  And it was all burning; fire devoured not just A Thousand Towers but the whole realm. An arc of fire swung through the Easthold down to the islands of the south; looking west, he seemed to be able to see over the Hrithaens, the tallest mountains in the world, and he found that the narrow plains of the Westhold also blazed, bright with death. At last he looked north, where he saw the Whitethorn Mountains, belying their name, black as cinders surrounding the red coals that had been the Northhold. Seeing that the flames had died down in the north, he realized that the fire must have started there. For the first time, fear struck through his dreaming calm. For the first time, it seemed more than a dream.

  “Lernaion!” He awakened to the harsh croak of his own voice in the midnight darkness of his room. Sleep did not return to him that night.

  The summoner Earno went to Illion’s house the next morning before dawn. Illion, already known as Illion the Wise, was a vocate, the second rank of Guardian. Most of his peers belonged to one of the three factions that followed each of the Three Summoners. There were some free voices heard at Station, though, who spoke their own words and adhered to no faction; notorious among these was Illion. For that reason he was no obvious ally to Earno. But when the summoner looked for advice, he not infrequently went to his neighbor and opponent Illion.

  The vocate, who was having breakfast, invited his senior in, but Earno sat sullenly at the table without eating anything; he spoke hardly more than he ate. Illion, seeing his mood, waited until he was ready to speak his mind.

  “Vocate Illion,” Earno said finally, “I must leave this morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” Illion said. “I’d hoped we could work together on the Kaenish matter. If the Two Powers are reaching westward—”

  “Yes, well, that’s dead and buried now.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not, though. I’d hoped we could discuss it with those who sometimes speak along with me at Station.”

  “This Station is over, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I don’t see why. There’s much that can be done; there’s much that needs doing.”

  “You misunderstand me. I must leave A Thousand Towers. I must . . .” Earno seemed to hear the almost hysterical compulsion in his own voice and concluded curtly, “I am going north.”

  “Oh.” Illion thought about this for a while. The summoner Lernaion had gone north early in the year, to set the protective wards about the Northhold. That had been in late winter, on the twenty-second of Jaric. It was now the twenty-sixth of the Mother and the Maiden, well into fall. Perhaps two hundred and eighty days had passed, with not even a message from the north. People were beginning to talk. “You are concerned for Lernaion?” he said finally.

  “Yes.” Earno met his eye with a glare.

  Illion recognized Earno’s defensiveness on the subject of Lernaion, whose faction he had followed when he was a vocate. But, for himself, he respected Earno’s insight and was troubled.

  They rose from the table and walked out of the wide open doors of Illion’s house. The sun had just risen, red on the western horizon. Earno silently saluted Tower Ambrose, unruined, brooding over the river Ruleijn. They turned their back on it and walked down toward the old city walls where the Station Chamber stood.

  “After the Station ends,” Illion said, “I will be going up to Three Hills. There will be some other vocates with me.”

  Three Hills was in Westhold, just south of Northhold’s border. “For how long?” Earno asked.

  “Three or four of us will always be there, until I hear from you.”

  Earno nodded. They walked the rest of the way in silence.

  Earno returned home and gathered some things together. Just as he was mounting his horse to depart, a young woman wearing the gray cape of a thain rode up and handed him a message.

  It was unsigned, but written in Illion’s tall, tangled script. It said only: Morlock syr Theorn, thain, guarding at the Lonetower in the Gap of Lone. He served me well as guide in the north, five years ago. He has also walked some of the unguarded lands, including Kaen.

  “My regards to Illion,” Earno said curtly to the thain, who was waiting for a response. “I find his advice good.”

  “
When isn’t it?” she replied brashly.

  He waved her away and rode off down the street.

  “The Road,” as an Easthold proverb boasts, “runs.” It links A Thousand Towers with the densely populated manors and port-cities of the south; it penetrates the Hrithaens to communicate with Westhold; it spans the long arc of Easthold, north to south.

  The Road runs—but not forever. Earno came to its northernmost point as darkness was falling on the thirteenth day of the month of Bayring. The stone paving simply came to an end without so much as a signpost or a milestone. But, Earno reflected, a signpost was hardly necessary. Travellers who came this far north surely knew where they were going . . . or didn’t care where they went.

  There was an inn at the end of the road, but Earno didn’t enter it. The Lonetower was only a short ride north of here. But he dismounted to give his horse and himself some rest.

  Chariot, the first moon, was standing halfway down toward the eastern horizon. In a month and a half it would set and the first month of the new year would begin: Cymbals, named for the characteristic instrument of the Winter Feast. The second moon, Horseman, whose rising and setting marked the months, would rise again on the first night of Borderer, the last month, to finally set on the last night of the year. Now Earno watched the western horizon for the rise of Trumpeter, the third moon. It, too, would set on the last night of the year, but it was faster as well as smaller than its two companions: it would cross the sky three times before then.

  Now it rose, fiercely radiant as it ascended from the west. Small though it was, it shed twice as much light as somber Chariot, sinking in the east. Earno watched Trumpeter clear the horizon (crooked with the Hrithaen peaks), then remounted his horse and rode on through the dim blue landscape. Not much later he arrived at the Lonetower in the Gap of Lone.

  A sentinel in the gray cape of a thain greeted him at the gate of the tower, taking in his white mantle of office. “Hail Summoner . . . Earno?” he said, somewhat tentatively, peering in the light of the moons.