by James Enge
“Stop that prancing,” the intruder said in fairly good Kaenish (with a Wardic, almost a Dwarvish, accent).
“My religion requires it,” Shollumech replied, with as much dignity as he could muster.
The intruder said something inaesthetic and, as far as Shollumech knew, untrue about the requirements of Kaenish religion. “I want you to tell me about this fire-under-water stuff,” the intruder continued. “I don’t have a lot of time, and I can’t afford to be gentle. Will you tell me?”
“The soldiers might have told you,” Shollumech explained. “And the other man was my alchemist; he would have been your property at the end of the battle, so I had to kill him. He would have told you.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“I do not answer questions. I am the Fyor-tirgan Shollumech Kekklidas and I defy you to the death. Moreover, I have taken an oath by my right hand never to surrender the secret of my fire-in-water agent. May I know your name?”
The intruder stared at him for a few moments with his searing gray eyes and then said, “Why not? I am Morlock Ambrosius, vocate to the Graith of Guardians.”
“Ambrosius,” Shollumech repeated. “That would account for the . . . the, uh . . .”
Morlock was amused. “Yes, that accounts for my crooked shoulders.”
In fact, Shollumech had been warned by his gods to watch out for any of the Ambrosii who passed his way. They had gotten on the wrong side of the Two Powers somehow. If Shollumech were a shrewder, more businesslike man he might have been able to turn this situation to his advantage somehow. But he wasn’t sure what the religious implications would be if he did a favor for the Two Powers. They weren’t his gods . . .
But the intruder was saying something. “You are serious about this oath to your right hand?” he asked.
“No one,” Shollumech assured him, “below the rank of heresiarch takes oaths as seriously as I do. They bind me with the powers of the gods I feed.”
“All right,” said Morlock resignedly, and slashed off Shollumech’s right hand.
Shollumech passed out before he could even scream. But he awoke while Morlock was cauterizing the stump of his right wrist in the brazier the dead soldiers had used to light the catapult shots. Then he screamed. He screamed and screamed.
Morlock let him go on for a while, but then he stuck the fuming stump into a bucket of soldier’s wine and said, “Listen to me. Look at me.”
Shollumech did so. The bloodstained vocate held up Shollumech’s severed hand. “I now hold your right hand, and your oath,” said Morlock. “You will now tell me what you know about the fire-in-water agent.”
Shollumech’s mind, never very swift, was now slowed with pain and blood loss. Nonetheless, it seemed to him that Morlock’s demand was in accord with the dictates of religion.
“There are bottles of red fluid and bottles of blue fluid,” Shollumech said dully. “Next to the catapult in a sort of box. Either is inert by itself; when combined, they burn. In air, the fire will spread normally. In water, the fire will burn whatever it touches until the agent is consumed.”
“How is it made?”
“I don’t know. The alchemists discovered it. One killed the others to keep the secret for himself, and now I’ve killed him. He made up the agent, day by day, for my night attacks.”
Morlock went over to the catapult and found the bottles arranged in the alchemist’s maijarra wood case. He closed it and brought it with him back to Shollumech, sitting sprawled on the tower stones beside his fallen soldiers.
“Listen,” said Morlock, tossing the severed hand aside. “I don’t want to kill you if I don’t have to. Will you take an oath by your head that you won’t raise the alarm against me before dawn?”
Shollumech replied in the negative with the most inaesthetic thing he had ever said in his life. He was surprised at himself. Apparently some instincts ran even deeper than the esthetic impulse. He was still pondering the ramifications of this discovery when Morlock stabbed him through the heart.
Morlock armed and clothed himself from the fallen soldiers’ relatively unbloodied gear. One of them wore boots that were about his size, so he took those as well. But he tore Shollumech’s insignia, a dancing yellow boar, from everything he took. And he cut off Shollumech’s head and brought it with him as a passport. As he understood the customs of the country, the death of the Fyor-tirgan would absolve his followers of any obedience or loyalty. It didn’t mean that they wouldn’t want to kill him for other reasons, but he’d face that contingency when it arose.
In the event, he saw no one. Apparently Shollumech’s agonized screams had been enough to set off the frenzied looting of his quarters that was the traditional accompaniment of a Kaenish noble’s death. Morlock made it down through the unguarded tower unseen and left Shollumech’s head on the threshold for proper burial with the rest of his body.
Morlock’s shoulder was beginning to bother him, near where the woman had bitten him on the neck. It might have been his imagination, but he felt as if there was something long and thornlike there, deep under the skin. And his veins screamed in sick longing for the drug the woman’s bite had poisoned him with. He didn’t think that he had gotten the dose that the citizens of Thyläkotröx got straight from the One. If he had, he might not have been able to resist.
He suspected that the woman with the thorns in her mouth was designed by the One to lure people into the city by infecting them with the drug and making them want more. Or she might (with her alarming sexual urges) be part of the One’s peculiar reproductive setup. The two purposes weren’t necessarily at odds. In time the One would probably grow shrewder, learn from its mistakes, and make better lures. Morlock hoped it wouldn’t have time to do so . . . but he was achingly conscious that it was he who was running out of time.
Morlock walked along the bitter black beach northward from Shollumech’s tower. He really only had one line of attack open to him, and because the One knew that as well as he did, they were waiting for him.
Chariot, the major moon, was sullen as it sank toward the east. Horseman, the second moon, was high overhead, with Trumpeter, the third moon, fierce with renewed light as it rose in the west over the Grartan Range. By the combined light of the three moons he clearly saw his antagonists.
They were, or had been, citizens of Thyläkotröx, lining the way from the rocky beach to the city on the heights. But their silhouettes were distorted in the varied moonlight. They looked almost as if they were wearing armor, but on approaching them Morlock saw that their torsos were wrapped in tight cages of black shining branches. Their hands were entirely gone: the arms ended in long bladelike thorns. Clouds of thorns obscured their faces.
They were well protected, and there were many of them. But they walked with awkward stiffness, and Morlock, with a thorn growing in his shoulder, thought he understood why. This was his advantage, then: speed.
He used it. He’d looted two swords from Shollumech’s dead soldiers, and he drew them both now. (The maijarra box with the fire agent was strapped to his shoulders.) He charged the thorn-soldiers at the end of the line, striking off the hand-blades of the last thorn-soldier with a double stroke, then swung both his swords around to bring them back up without slowing and struck off the thorn-soldier’s head. It bounced off Morlock’s chest, piercing it at several places, and the body slumped down to the black stones of the beach.
The next soldier in the line was almost upon him. Morlock stabbed his enemy in the open area between the basket of thorns protecting his head and the breastplate of black branches. The man went down coughing up blood . . . of a sort. Blood would have been black in the moonlight; this stuff was transparent, yellowish or green.
He killed a few more, working his way up the line, but then they began to cluster around him, using their numbers to advantage. So he ran northward up the shoreline.
His thinking was this: it was the parasite thorns that slowed the soldiers’ movements. They would have bee
n infected at different times. It was reasonable to assume that they would move at different speeds, with different amounts of the thorn-parasite cluttering up their insides.
Morlock looked back as he ran and saw with satisfaction that they were stringing out behind him on the black beach. He spun around without slowing and ran back at the straggling line of thorn-soldiers.
He killed the first one with a stab to the neck; the second he disabled with a leg cut and finished off with a thrust between the slats of the breastplate. From there he was in the thick of it, striking down thorn-soldiers as he went with a savage satisfaction he rarely felt in a fight. He felt he was not killing these men but ending their slavery to the One. The thorn in his shoulder glowed green-gold with pleasure but he was not aware of it.
His satisfaction ended when a long thorn stabbed him in the side from behind. He broke off from the thorn-soldier he had been fighting and put his wounded back to the sea.
There was another line of thorn-soldiers shuffling toward him; the nearest held a thorn-blade already afire from his Ambrosial blood. They must have been placed farther to the north. Morlock did not understand why the One had done that, and there was no time to think about it as several thorn-soldiers attacked.
Morlock slashed frantically with both his swords at the thorn-blades stabbing at him. When he could afford to move he ran northward up the beach, splashing sometimes through the shallows as the waves surged up among the rocks.
What had worked in his favor before was working against him now. It was the swiftest of the northern line of soldiers that had attacked him from behind. The other, slower ones were straggling behind northward in a rough line parallel with the water’s edge. Morlock was in real danger of being pinned against the water.
This is the end, said a voice in his mind, and the thorn in his shoulder throbbed with sudden agony. Only then did he realize it had been feeding him pleasure as he fought. It had done so for a reason, but he didn’t have time to think about it now.
Not normally a cursing man, Morlock damned the thorn—its pleasure, pain, and despair—and cast his eye as he ran, along the ragged column of thorn-soldiers. It had to be ragged; there had to be gaps.
He saw one: a single thorn-soldier shuffling by itself behind a cluster of faster ones and a clot of slower ones. Morlock charged him and struck him down as he passed, heading into the higher land, approaching the town (black on the horizon in Chariot’s red light).
Once he had a little height he stopped and turned back. The thorn in his shoulder punished him with a blaze of suffering, so he knew he was doing the right thing. There was something he didn’t understand here, and it was important. It was more than just the heat of battle clouding up his mind: something was trying to keep him from understanding, luring him with pleasure to fight the endless parades of thorn-soldiers, missing the real point.
The thornlike pain in his shoulder and neck was growing even more intense. He seemed to hear a blurry voice whispering to him that it was too late, that there was no point, that even if he did understand there was nothing he could do, that what he had to do was run now, far and fast, to save himself.
That was what the voice within him wanted him to do, so he didn’t. He planted himself on the slope and looked at the ragged groups of thorn-soldiers shuffling toward him and he thought.
Two lines of soldiers made a certain amount of sense, so the one could reinforce the other, but why so far apart? It had been long minutes before the northern column had staggered down to assist the southern column.
The answer came crashing in on him at last. There was something between the two lines that the One wanted to protect . . . almost certainly the same thing he wanted to attack: its underwater mouth.
Morlock sheathed his swords and unstrapped the maijarra box from his back. He knotted the straps into a single long tether and hooked it onto the box. He drew a sword with his free hand and ran down the slope, whirling the box over his head.
The clot of thorn-soldiers in his path seemed to stare for a moment at the whirling box, and then they suddenly separated, shuffling in different directions.
Morlock leapt toward one. As he whirled the box over his head the thorn-soldier did a dance of anxiety (strangely like the dance Shollumech had done when he had killed his alchemist) and ran back into the sea to escape. Morlock followed and, when the soldier was knee deep in the surf, he smashed the maijarra wood box on the thorn-soldier’s head. Some of the bottles inside broke, and fire agent splashed all over the thorn-soldier, setting him instantly alight. Morlock thrust with his drawn sword through the box as it fell past the thorn-soldier’s neck and left the sword in the wound, pinning the box in place. The flailing thorn-soldier gave a buzzing scream and jumped into the deep water to douse the flames. Morlock took a long breath and followed.
The Narrow Sea didn’t have the tremendous surging waves of the ocean that faced the edge of the sky. But it did shoal fairly rapidly; they were already deep in the dark water. The thorn-soldier was not flailing any longer; he appeared to be dead. But still he burned, tiger-bright in the night-dark sea, drifting slowly downward.
Then, by the light of the burning thorn-soldier, Morlock saw his target in the green-black gloom of the sea floor: a great pulsating mouth, rimmed with thornlike hair. This was the route that Zoyev had travelled after the Sammark was wrecked, the route he meant the burning corpse to follow now. There must be some sort of stalk or throat that ran under the ground to a belly beneath the town. Was the One really a plant, or some sort of animal?
The wounds in Morlock’s side and neck were burning from the salt water; the thorn in his shoulder was an agony brighter than the burning corpse he was shepherding downward with his remaining sword. His lungs were straining to hold their air. Perhaps this was not the best time to speculate on the genus of a monster he was trying to kill.
The burning body was drifting down toward the mouth, but too slowly to suit Morlock. He ran it through the chest with the second sword in his hand and left this sword also in the wound.
Then he let the burning corpse fall away and he arrowed upward through the night-dark water to the surface shimmering with the light of the three moons. He broke through the surface and trod water for a while, breathing life back into his lungs.
Presently he poked his head beneath the waves: he thought he saw a gleam of orange swallowed in the gloom below. He hoped that the One could no more refrain from drawing things into its sea-mouth than a tree could refrain from drinking through its roots or a man could refrain from breathing. If so, his little present to the One was well on its way.
It was. The burning corpse entered the thorny sea-mouth and travelled, submerged, down a pulsating tunnel. A trail of fire followed on its wake, down the floor of the pulsating tunnel. It surfaced at last alongside a heap of debris in an underground chamber, also covered with pulsating flesh. This was where the One absorbed the bodies and spirits of the things it swallowed through its sea-mouth. Zoyev’s half-consumed body was there, along with others from the Sammark and still others from other vessels lost at sea, and dead sea creatures, and other wrack.
The fire began to spread from the burning corpse to the drying matter in the great island of offal in the One’s belly. It began to be hot—hot enough to dry the pulsating walls. The pressure increased with the heat as the belly filled with smoke and steam.
In the end, the belly of the One exploded, sending flames shooting far up along its stem, showering them through the city of Thyläkotröx.
Morlock first guessed that his stratagem was working when the thorn in his shoulder burned its way out through the flesh.
He had been playing hide-and-seek with the thorn-soldiers for hours, it seemed, ever since he had waded to land. Annoyingly, they always seemed to know where he was: led by the parasite within him, no doubt.
When the thorn began to grow hot, Morlock first assumed that it was a trick by the One to make him cry out, so naturally he did not. But the pain grew even more
intense and seemed to move outward through his flesh. And he heard the thorn-soldiers thrashing about and shrieking with suddenly clear voices down on the sharp-stoned beach. That was when Morlock understood what was happening.
Morlock gritted his teeth and clenched his fists as the thorn emerged, smoking, from his shoulder, burned its way through his shirt, and fell to the ground, wriggling like a snake made of embers on the dark stones.
The agony was intense, but even greater was the relief that it was out of his body. Somehow the sympathy that allowed the One to control this fragment of itself meant that the fragment was compelled to die along with the One.
And the One was dying, perhaps was already dead. Morlock raised his eyes to the dark battlements of Thyläkotröx and saw they were outlined in light: a fountain of fire and sparks rising up into the sky from the city center. Then he knew for certain that the seed of fire he had planted in the sea had flowered into the One’s blazing death.
The thorn-soldiers lay silent, bright as live coals scattered over the dark shore. Morlock looked at them and didn’t like to think of what it was like in the city now. Many of the people must be dying horrible deaths as the parasite thorns burned their way out of the host bodies. Perhaps some of the citizens would survive, but he doubted they would bless the man who took their happiness away with this deadly brightness.
He watched the fire rising over Thyläkotröx for a while, triumphant at the One’s death but still guilty over the suffering he had caused. While the One was alive, he had known exactly what to do: whatever the One opposed. Now he wondered if he had been right to be so single-minded, if his determination to oppose the One hadn’t made him into a distorted reflection of the One, the same image painted in more fiery colors. Maybe there had been some third way he could have taken, to oppose the One but save the people it had infected. . . . But, if there was, even now he couldn’t see it.
Morlock shrugged his crooked, wounded shoulders and turned away from the burning city, walking northward up the dark shoreline toward the Gap of Lone and home. For a long time, as he walked, his distorted shadow danced before him, outlined in fiery light.