by James Enge
Morlock abruptly became conscious of a silence that already seemed to have lasted a long time. He looked up and saw the summoner again staring out the window. This was the bitterest of insults to a dwarf, worse even than staring over one’s head while talking. Perhaps Earno was unaware of this, or perhaps he was offended by Morlock’s inattention. Now it seemed as if Morlock must explain his “memories” of the Two Powers, to explain his preoccupation.
Something held him back, though. It was something like resentment, or perhaps merely disappointment. This was not how he had imagined his conference with Earno would go. He had hoped he would be able to tell Earno everything that had happened. Then Earno would explain to him whatever was confusing: the strange corpse in Saijok Mahr’s pool, the repulsive and frightening notion that dragons and dwarves were somehow akin, the ineffectiveness of dragonspell upon him. Perhaps, he had thought, Earno would even explain those nightmarish memories of . . . of being Merlin. Morlock had never once doubted that Earno could do all this. Earno was wise; what he did not know he could find ways to understand.
But things were going wrong. Earno would not even listen to what he knew for certain, much less explain to him what remained mysterious. Earno, indeed, was rich in explanations, but they meant nothing; they were intended to cover up facts, not account for them.
Morlock acknowledged his resentment, but strove to keep it in check. He had spoken badly, perhaps. Earno came from a different folk. The fault might be his own. There might be no fault. In any case, he would correct the situation now. He would make Earno (Earno that fool he had tried to warn him)—he would make him understand.
Speaking carefully, slowly and in detail he explained. He had much to say, but he began with the matter of Vendas. He told Earno everything that had passed between him and his harven kin at the High Gates before Earno’s arrival. He demonstrated, with mechanical precision, that Deor could have told him nothing about the Two Powers, or else that he himself was an irrecoverable liar.
Earno seemed to believe him, becoming more receptive as he spoke. But Morlock did not relax.
He found his apprehension justified. When he concluded Earno remarked, “This confirms my impression. You must have been under a dragonspell—”
Morlock reflected gloomily that this was one more thing he could not tell the summoner. If he claimed at this point to be immune to dragonspell . . . well, he simply would not be believed. He reflected that if Earno was intent on disbelieving everything he said, there had been little point in sending him to Haukrull. Almost absentmindedly he remarked, “I am not under a dragonspell. You may test this, if you like.”
“Nevertheless, you may have been—”
“If I had been and it had passed I would remember the placing of the spell.” He was baiting the summoner, in a way—daring him to say the word liar.
Earno sensed the defiance without understanding it and let some of his own long-held anger loose. “I think I have more experience in these matters than you—”
“Summoner, it was I who stood before Saijok Mahr and Vild Kharum. That is my experience. It was what you sent me to do.”
“Then make your report!” the summoner commanded.
It was the last chance, Morlock knew. If Earno learned, in this temper, that he had deliberately not delivered the challenge . . . it would mean he would no longer be heard. If only the summoner were not so suspicious, so reluctant to approach the truths Morlock had to tell him.
Again he began slowly, describing in detail the entrance to Saijok Mahr’s den. Too much detail, it seemed; before long Earno broke in impatiently. “Get to the point!”
It was no use, Morlock decided. He told the rest of his story in five flat sentences. After concluding his narrative he added, “Trua and her people will need assistance before winter sets in, or they will die. If you permit, I will tell the Eldest of them.”
Earno heard him through with obviously increasing anger. The summoner kept his face averted (scornfully, so Morlock thought), so he could be seen only in profile. “That confirms it, then,” he said, when Morlock was finished speaking. “You willfully disobeyed my command. You must have been under control.”
“I was not!” Morlock shouted, losing his temper at last.
“Don’t be too eager to deny it, Thain. It may be all that stands between you and exile.”
Morlock leapt to his feet, biting back an inarticulate cry of anger. “More than that . . .” he said, choking with anger, “there is more than that between me and exile. I had no absolute command to deliver a challenge. You said it yourself, you said . . . if we knew there was a guile in Haukrull there’d be no need . . . to send me there. I was sent, first, to . . . to find out. To learn—”
“You found a guile. You spoke to the master. The challenge should have been given.”
“There is a guile and there is not,” Morlock replied. “Why will you not understand? This is not a guile as you know them. It does not live and die by the fear of a single leader. Your challenge is a futile gambit—”
“There is enough despair being preached beneath these mountains—”
“I do not despair. There is a way. If you will listen—”
“I have been listening. That is your problem, Thain—not that I have not heard you, but that I have heard you all too well.”
Morlock shook his head and tried to begin again. “Listen—that is . . . Listen, Summoner. Suppose what you say is true. What harm has it done—” He broke off, enraged at the weakness of his appeal, the pleading in his voice. Why should he have to persuade his senior to hear the facts he had been commanded to learn?
“What harm?” said the summoner incredulously. “Instead of awaiting my advent the master may have taken the guile hunting through the Wardlands!”
Morlock found this too senseless to even be infuriating. Clearly the dragons aimed to reduce the north to captivity first. If they had intended to attack the rest of the Wardlands they’d had the months of summer and fall to do it in. “Well. Has he?” Morlock demanded dryly.
“Who are you to make demands of me,” Earno shouted, “as if I were the thain and you were the summoner? I no longer require your presence, Thain Morlock, here or anywhere in the north. Tomorrow I will send you south with a letter. In the meantime—get out!”
Morlock turned and left the room without speaking.
That night in dreams, Morlock was Merlin the exile. For a tenth of all they possessed the citizens of Aflraun had purchased his services. For that price, paid in advance, Ambrosius swore to defend them against Earno Summoner, the dragon who threatened their homes with his guile.
The accursed sword Gryregaest glittered darkly in Ambrosius’ hand as the dragon swept in from the west and south. The towers of Aflraun were lit up by the dragon’s blood-bright spell-haunted eyes, like the peaks of Thrymhaiam in evening light.
Traitor! Liar! Exile! the dragon snarled. I know you, Ambrosius, and your kind.
Ambrosius raised the sword Gryregaest in reply; the blue light of banefire still surrounded it. The deadly light flared in midair and tightened around Earno Dragon like a net of blazing blue wires. The dragon began to burn with blue light, and continued to burn until there was nothing left of the dragon but a pile of ashes, like a heavy white cloak in the blue light of the banefire. He laughed, with a terrifying sense of vengeance achieved, until something stirred under the white cloak, crying, “Morlock!”
Guilt was the hook dragging him to wakefulness. He was Morlock, not Merlin. Vengeance for him was neither attainable nor thinkable. He was sorry, now, that he had killed Earno. Nothing could atone for such a crime. He was sick with shame and guilt, yet his head rang with echoes of imperfectly suppressed anger, like voices calling his name.
“Morlock!”
He would have to go before the Graith and confess. Or perhaps it would be better to flee across the border and hide in the unguarded lands. He might meet his father there. . . .
“Morlock! Hey, Morlock! It’s no u
se, Raev. Go tell the summoner it’s as I told him before: he’s too sick to travel.”
“Wait,” Morlock said thickly.
“Ach—Canyon take you, Morlock, go back to sleep!”
Morlock opened his eyes. Deortheorn and a younger cousin of his, Raev, were standing next to Morlock’s bed.
“What is it?” Morlock asked heavily.
“Earno’s sending you south. Here’s a letter you’re to carry.”
Morlock sat up cautiously. He was in the journey-makers’ sleeping hall, which was always dimly lit, as travelling workers are apt to sleep at any hour. Apparently he had not killed Earno, or anyone. Yet. He took the letter from Deor.
“Morlock, you can’t go,” Deor said. He didn’t have to say why. The dragons would be watching all travel south. Several messages had already been sent to warn the other holds. They had gone by relay parties, some of whom were to return at each stage of the road, so that the group’s progress could be gauged. No one had yet returned from any group, and all were being mourned as dead.
Morlock shrugged. “I’ll go. I’m a Guardian, Deor.”
Deor looked him in the eye. “I don’t much like the Guardians I’ve met, Morlock. So that says nothing to me.”
Morlock shrugged again. He was in no mood to disagree.
In a matter of moments Morlock was dressed. He bid Deor and Raev good-bye. Then he went to Southgate, or what had been Southgate. It was noon by the time he arrived there. The dwarves on watch greeted him as Rokhlan. They had a horse standing ready for him, the one he had ridden from the Rangan outpost. He viewed it with disfavor and mounted.
As he rode out among the ruins of Southgate he saw that much of the rubble was cleared away, and the stone cut down to bedrock where the southeast edge of the mountain had run. Parties of dwarves worked steadily as he passed, laying the foundation of the new wall. There were no dragons in sight . . . except the slain one, of course. It had been burned on the little hill where it had died, but the bones remained, black and ominous, against the pale clear sky of late fall.
Morlock breathed deeply. The air was clean and cold; he could see his breath. In vague curiosity, he rode up the black hill to look more closely at the dragon’s bones.
Coming upon the head of the dragon, he saw with surprise that every tooth in its mouth had been smashed. Deliberately smashed; he could see the lines of the mallet-strokes from where he sat in the saddle.
He turned away with a sinking feeling. So obviously purposeful an act had not been done out of mere malice. Were the dwarves, even now, drawing the sentinel dragon from the Coriam Lakes, and smashing the corpse’s teeth in their sockets, one by one? The notion disturbed him. Dwarves knew more about dragons than he had ever realized—far more than they had ever taught him. After his journey through dragon-infested Haukrull their reticence seemed somehow sinister. He had been taught that the Longest War was a conflict between . . . well, alien races, totally opposed peoples . . . good and evil. Perhaps it had been something more complicated: civil war—or some conflict closer and bloodier still. A family quarrel?
Wishing they had told him, he realized sadly that he thought of them as them. He was no longer one of them, had never really been, and they (wiser than he) had known it long ago.
Feeling rootless, he sensed a loss of purpose. He knew he should rouse his horse and move south with Earno’s message. Yet nothing moved him to do this. In fact, he reached for the letter, broke its seal and read it.
It was addressed to a member of Earno’s faction. It requested that the vocate gather a few colleagues and come north “as soon as is convenient.” In a postscript Earno suggested that they begin proceedings to accuse, “one Morlock Ambrosius, the bearer of this letter” of impairment of the Guard. It was a curt and matter-of-fact message. There was nothing in it that suggested the actual facts, however: that the north had been invaded by dragons, that these had captured or killed Summoner Lernaion and his companions, that Earno himself was preparing for mortal combat with the master dragon.
Morlock lifted his face toward the gray fire-broken mountains of the west. That was the way he would go to deliver the letter: west, then south. (Earno’s partisan lived in the Westhold.) He would have to pass Three Hills, where Illion lived. He felt, suddenly, that it would be wise, wiser than he knew, to simply do as he had been told. That way it would all work out, though perhaps not as Earno or anyone else had envisioned. Perhaps it would be wise.
But he did not feel wise. It occurred to him that he was still thain-attendant to Earno and that (if the battle with Vild Kharum was not to be utterly doomed) he would need a weapon. There were many of these under Thrymhaiam, of course, and if there was need of another, then another could be made. But in that moment Morlock remembered his dream, in which he had used the sword Gryregaest to slay a dragon—Gryregaest, which (so the songs said) his ruthen father had left upon the Hill of Storms a millennium ago.
Morlock tore the letter in half and dropped it beside the dragon’s bones. As an afterthought he returned to the grave of the rokhleni and took the battered black shield of the Ambrosii from the marker. Then he turned his horse and rode away south, toward the dead gray border of the gravehills.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Guardians
The air was suddenly thick with the sounds of the Dwarvish language.
“San ralem hedra mat,” the Eldest Tyr was saying urgently as the door to his chambers swung open. “San ralem hedra hŷn—” He was addressing Vetr, his oldest son.
Deor, standing in the corridor outside, drew back instinctively. His title-of-authority, doron onedra (“kin-councillor”) was no mean one. But his actual seniority, based on his age and kin-relationship to the Eldest, was much lower. As a matter of course, he knew of the lack of sympathy that prevailed between the Eldest and his oldest son, who would one day succeed him as ruler of the Seven Clans. But, like others, he did not care to think of it, and he took care to avoid witnessing scenes that were none of his business.
“Remember my words!” the Eldest was saying to his heir. “Remember them well—”
“Those words are not for me,” Deor broke in, in an agony of embarrassment. “Permit me to withdraw!”
The Eldest looked from his son to Deor in surprise, although the younger dwarf was here at his summons. He put out his hands and said words of welcome—even relief. If he had been speaking another language (he was fluent in several) he might have said merely, “Deor, I’m glad you’ve come.” Dwarvish being a language rich in metaphor, what he actually said was, “Resh tornet, Heimar ingranat lo.” (Literally, “If the sun had risen, [or] the King had just been crowned.”) Deor understood him well enough, although he preferred a plainer style himself, and stayed where he was.
Vetr was less welcoming and less formal. He curtly nodded at Deor and, not noticing his father in any way, walked off down the corridor.
“Never mind,” said the Eldest, leading Deor into his chambers. “He has cause for his feelings. He’s a good son; he’ll be a good Eldest.”
“An excellent son,” Deor said mechanically, glancing around the room. He saw the summoner Earno seated at a table near an inner door, staring fixedly at a candle that provided the room’s only light. “I beg your pardon, Summoner,” he said, speaking in Wardic. “I didn’t see you . . .” His voice trailed off. The summoner didn’t seem to notice his presence.
Deor looked at the Eldest. “Does the summoner understand us?” he asked in Dwarvish.
“No, not even if we spoke their Othertalk. But let’s stick to Dwarvish, eh? The words will come more readily.”
Deor nodded slowly. He turned back to the summoner, who was still staring at the candle.
“Look in his eyes,” Tyr commanded.
The Eldest was the Eldest—but all the same, “I would rather not,” said Deor. “He is under a dragonspell?”
“Yes.”
Deor was tempted to ask about the state of fascination that Earno was in and how the Eldest had es
tablished it. But the Elders have their secrets, and there were more urgent questions. “Since when?” he asked.
“I do not know. I suspect since the first night he was here.”
Deor tried to remember when that was, it seemed so long ago. Then he remembered: that was the first night the dragons had attacked Thrymhaiam.
“Well,” he said. “I do not like this, Eldest Tyr!”
“No more do I.”
“How long have you known, if you choose to tell me?”
“Since this afternoon, when Morlock left.”
“How did you know?”
“I guessed it when I read the letter. After that I took certain steps.”
“‘The letter’? Earno’s letter? Morlock showed it to you?”
“Not exactly. It’s on the table yonder.”
So it was. Deor went and picked it up. It was torn in half. He held the pieces together and read it.
He turned to his Eldest. “How did it come to you?” he demanded. The question was blunt, brutally blunt from one so junior to one so senior. But he had given it to Morlock himself. The thing touched his honor; he had a right to know.
The Eldest was not annoyed. “Morlock read it and tore it apart on Rokhfell of Southgate,” the old dwarf said. “I was watching him, although he did not seem to notice me.”
“What did he say when you spoke to him?”
“I didn’t. I was with the work parties, some distance away. By the time I reached Rokhfell he had ridden away.”
“West?”
“South. I expect he means to raise the alarm in other holds. We think none of our messengers survived, you know—but he might, as he did in Haukrull vale. And he has his obligations to the Graith.”
Deor nodded in agreement. “The very thing. Earno must be a madman. Morlock a traitor!”
“Earno is spellbound. That is a kind of madness, an induced one.”