by James Enge
Memory settled down on her, layer by layer, until she had remembered all of yesterday’s bizarre events. Why she had ever thought Morlock was the solution to her peculiar problem, she could not imagine. . . .
No, that wasn’t fair to her or to Morlock. The man was a problem solver, in many ways the most remarkable man she had ever met, even if he wasn’t so much to look at. And he was crazy about her, in a good way. At the very least she’d found a way to deal with her trouble.
But the situation presented certain difficulties. They still had to work together—and, on this mission, live cheek-by-jowl. What if she decided she didn’t want to . . . to be intimate again? Or what if his infatuation faded? Infatuations do. They had been crazy, reckless, and stupid, but one way out of the dilemma was to look each other in the eye this morning and say, All right; it happened; we don’t regret it. But it’s not going to happen again.
Morlock’s beautiful gray eyes opened and looked straight into hers. “Praise the day, Vocate Aloê,” he said, smiling but somehow serious.
“Bring me off again,” she said: greedily, incoherently, as she kissed his face. And he did, stroking her body with his strong clever hands, kissing her face and neck, whispering words in her ear that she didn’t understand. He carried her over the threshold of orgasm.
Afterward, as she lay there resting in his arms, she said, “Hey. I’m not the first woman you’ve done this with.”
“It’s true,” he said. “I’m no Jordel. But I’ve been around the block a few times, as the saying is.”
“Oh.” A thought occurred to her. “Jordel has not been around my block, in case you were wondering.”
He nodded gravely, accepting this, but saying nothing.
“So who are some of your women? Anyone I know? The Honorable Ulvana, I hope not?”
“Who?” Morlock asked, genuinely baffled.
She laughed aloud, and something inside her that had never stopped hurting . . . Suddenly, it didn’t hurt anymore. Somehow she knew it would never hurt again.
“Never mind,” she said. “What about breakfast? Aren’t you usually up by this time?”
“I suppose so.”
She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. She thought about all those nights when she was curled up around him for warmth, and he was turned resolutely away, still as a stone. . . .
“You’ve had blue balls for all this time?” she said wonderingly. “That’s why you were always getting up and starting the fire and making things and stuff?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said, a little stiffly. “I often wake up early—get a lot of things done—this place may not be good for a fire, but—”
“Breakfast can wait a little longer.”
“I—I don’t think—”
“Your mouth is saying no, honey, but your penis is saying yes.”
His mouth stopped talking. She climbed atop him and gently embraced his penis with her thighs. She slowly rotated her hips up and down, down and up. He made a sound like he’d been stabbed and sprayed semen all over the back of her legs and her ass.
“I bet there’s more in there,” she whispered tauntingly in his ear.
“Not at the moment,” he whispered back. “Um. Thank you.”
“Say what you want to say.”
“Aloê,” he said, like a prayer, like an incantation, like a confession. “Aloê. Aloê.”
She kissed him three times, rolled off and went to wash.
The green recess, as she had suspected, concealed a stream from above that pooled a little before sinking down into the veins of the rock. The water was as clear and cold as mountain water could be. She scraped herself with it, scrubbed herself with it, immersed herself in it as much as the pool permitted.
The water carried the filth away like time carrying away the past. Something had ended and something had begun. She laughed and emerged clean from the pool, renewed, a part of her alive that hadn’t been yesterday.
Morlock also scrubbed himself fastidiously in the cold mountain water, although he didn’t look as refreshed by it as she’d been. They decided to eschew a fire and chew some flatbread and dried meat for breakfast. Then Morlock led the way uphill into a green mossy cleft between two rocky red slopes—a steep climb, she would have called it before yesterday’s vertical ascent.
They came at last to some stairs carved into the mossy stone. The stairs led to a plateau, and a road across it, and on the other side of the plateau what looked like a perfectly horrible little mountain town.
“Well, we’ll lunch in style at least,” Aloê remarked.
Morlock shrugged. Falling in love had not made him more talkative, it seemed.
According to the borderstone, the name of the town was Hoimëdmetheterön, which neither of them could make out as the name of any god. The borderstone was flanked by a wooden pillar bearing a strange symbol carved in stone. Aloê thought it was a hand covering up a statue: you could just see its feet below the hand and part of its head protruding on top. Whatever Morlock thought provoked him to grunt and shrug.
They stopped for lunch at the Brŷderwog Inn, the little town’s finest (and only) house of entertainment. Aloê had the ordinary lunch (venison soup with a bowl of pickled cabbage), whereas Morlock indulged in the special lunch (the same with some yellow pepper ground into it). The server, without prompting, swore binding and valid oaths about the harmlessness of the meal, and asked them to swear that they were not missionaries.
“Won’t swear,” Morlock said, meeting Aloê’s eye. “Merely affirm.”
“That’s all right,” the waitress said, quite bored by it all. “This is an open town, that’s all, so we don’t like people preaching their gods in here.”
“That’s no kind of conversation,” Aloê agreed. So that’s what the fist-covering-the-statue sigil must have meant: keep your gods to yourself. She’d have said as much to Morlock, but he would have just grunted back at her.
“It occurs to me,” Aloê said, when the server had made her lugubrious way back to the kitchen, “that all this treachery in Kaenish culture can work to our benefit. An innkeeper back in the—back home might feed us substandard or even poisonous food, if sufficiently reckless, but around here even the sausage vendors have to ensure their food is wholesome under oath.”
Morlock nodded slowly, and Aloê was afraid he was about to grunt thoughtfully.
But he actually said something. “Unless the server makes the food,” he remarked, “the oath might not be effective. Suppose the cook wants to harm the waitress?”
“You have a morbid imagination, partner,” she said, not in a disapproving way. “I was going to bargain with the server for supplies. Maybe I’d better go back and talk to the cook.”
Morlock nodded and began to extract Kaenish money from his multitude of pockets.
“Enough,” she said, when it was enough, and swept the coins into her hand.
The cook was an almost pyramidal man—wide at the hips, standing wide with bowlegs, narrow shoulders, and pointed cap—lazily puttering about the cavernous kitchen. She bargained with him for some dried sausage, cheese, and bread, which he swore by specific and binding oaths were free from harm. “And none of it from sheep nor goat,” he added with a certain satisfaction.
When she got back to the table with their bag of food, she found Morlock playing with fire. He was holding a fragment of burning wood on his palm. The flame was not rising but pointing at a crumbly gray cube of something lying on the table.
“What the hell,” she said cheerfully, “are you doing?” She plonked herself next to him on the bench and plonked the food next to herself.
“It’s a poison detector,” he said. “Variant of the Pursuer instrumentality.”
“Of course. One sees that at once.”
“The flame should nod toward anything poisonous—even a drug strong enough to cause sleep, though I’m not sure about that.”
“What’s that, then?” She pointed at the cube that
the flame was pointing at.
“Rat poison. It’s all around the room. They must have a serious rat problem.”
“And it’s on our table? I’m going to invoke that waitress’ oath—”
“Don’t. I put it there.” He picked up the cube with two fingers and tossed it into the darkest corner of the room—where, if Aloê was not mistaken, there was indeed a rat waiting for it. Then Morlock burned his fingers clean using the still-living flame of the poison detector.
The waitress brought their food and drink in on platters, started to say something, eyed the flame in Morlock’s hand, and thought better of it. When the detector acquitted the meal of being poisonous, Morlock snuffed the flame and they dug in.
The only other people in the refectory were already eating, but not very determinedly. They seemed to be there mostly to talk. One was the hairiest man she had ever seen, the other the baldest (except, perhaps, for the Summoner Bleys).
“. . . we’ll call it a draw, of course,” the bald man was saying ruefully.
“Don’t we always, Gnörymu my friend?” the shaggy man replied, and laughed boisterously. “But you thought you had me this time: admit it.”
“Klÿgnaru, stop. You’re embarrassing me.”
“No need to be embarrassed. We are friends, old friend, but our gods are not, and of course you serve your god. That is why we will die on that mountain, me serving Khÿmäroreibätu and you serving Öweioreibäto. We’re too loyal to do anything else.”
They continued their conversation, apparently settling a treaty of peace, and Aloê realized where she had heard the shaggy man’s voice before: he was the elephant-goat rider. Wasn’t Gnörymu the name he’d screamed out—I’m coming for you Gnörymu, or something like that? Yet here they were drinking bear-meat soup and sharing a loaf of bread. It was odd.
She glanced at Morlock to try and signal him somehow, but she saw he was already listening as he ate. He met her eye and lifted his bowlful of soup in salute. And that was odd, too—to have someone understand her without a spoken word. Someone besides Naevros.
They finished their soup and got up to leave. Something brushed by Aloê’s leg and scuttled along the floorboard to run out through a break in the swinging door that led to the street. Aloê would have said it was a rat, but it was wearing some sort of hooded robe.
As they passed the two archpriests, the shaggy one said, “And here we have the unwise pair who blundered through the middle of our battle. My god tells me they are Wardlanders.”
Morlock stopped and looked calmly at the two priests, his hand not very near the glass pommel of his sword, nor very far away. Aloê tried to imitate his air of casual menace.
“Don’t worry,” said the bald one, Gnörymu. “My god told me to steer clear of you, and I expect Klÿgnaru was told the same.”
“But they’re not avoiding us,” the shaggy one complained. “Look, youngsters, you were sent our way by that treacherous little godling Tekätestu the Many-Mouthed in the hope that we would kill you in our annual war. I’m glad you avoided that, because we’re not here to do Tekätestu any favors, nor the Two Powers, either. Because he hates you, I’ll do you this favor—a piece of advice. Avoid Thyläkotröx.”
“We don’t even know the way there from here,” Aloê said.
“The way where?” the shaggy man said vacantly. “Never mind! I have spoken. Good luck to you, travellers.”
Morlock seemed inclined to stay, so Aloê took him by the arm and led him away into the street.
“They can start a riot, at which we will be the guests of honor, just by saying more loudly what he said to us.” So Aloê reminded Morlock when they were safely outdoors. He shrugged impassively and then nodded more meaningly up the red dusty street.
Coming toward them was a limping figure wrapped in a hooded robe—much like the rat (was it a rat?) that Aloê had seen. But this was man-high—perhaps woman-high. Hunched over, it moved awkwardly up the street. The few townspeople in sight looked on with scorn, maybe a little fear. Aloê could understand that: she was fairly sure that the feet she saw hobbling underneath that robe were no human feet at all.
The figure stopped in front of them, and drew back its hood.
The face revealed was human . . . and not human. It had downy fur and an upturned soft flexible nose like a dog or a rat. Underneath it were sprouting long whiskers. But the eyes and ears and chin—the rest of the face was human, and female.
“Do you know me?” she said to Morlock. “We met a time ago.”
“Friend of yours?” Aloê murmured.
“I don’t remember you,” Morlock said to the rat-woman.
Her face and shoulders fell. “I was different then. I was happy and bright.”
Morlock took a step back, his faced stretched with surprise. “Yes. I remember you now. I never knew your name.”
“I had a name then, but even I don’t remember what it was. The One burned within me, destroying that knowledge and much else. I am called Masösa now.”
“I’m amazed that you survived. The One seemed to have—it seemed to have—”
“The One was in me and through me. I was an early apostate from Thyläkotröx, He Who Walks Beneath. I was not happy in Thyläkotröx. The One made me happy, and I gave myself to it. It was a happy green time. I saw you there, at the end of it.”
“You infected me with the One.”
“I wanted all the world to be happy and bright. You were so unhappy. Perhaps I did wrong. When you killed the One with fire, we all burned. Some burned to death. Some were burned but lived. Many of us were burned nearly to death; we lay dying in the streets. Then Thyläkotröx returned. In his mercy, he healed us and we did not die. In his wisdom, he punished us like . . . like this.” She gestured vaguely at herself with a ratlike paw. “I am not happy and bright now. But I know a truth that I didn’t before. The universe is not happy and bright. Only power matters. This is the lesson my god has taught me, and I am grateful for it. I hope someday to repay him. As lowly as I am, perhaps I could still repay him.”
“What would you have of me?”
“I? Nothing. Nothing. Once I hated you for killing the One, but other hates have swallowed that hate. But my god wishes to speak to you. He has a message about the Powers who live in the north, the Masked Powers who hunt you through the world.”
This was news to Aloê and to Morlock, too, by the bemused tone in his voice as he said, “They hunt me?”
“They hunt Ambrosius.”
“No names,” Aloê interrupted hurriedly. A small unfriendly crowd was gathering. Perhaps they suspected proselytizing. Maybe they were biased against rat-people. But they probably had no love for the Wardlands or Wardlanders. And Ambrosius was a famous name.
“My god wishes you to come with me,” the rat-woman said. “Will you, or not? I must return to him.”
“Why can’t your god appear to us here?” Aloê asked.
The rat-woman drew her hood over her face and gave a rather Morlockian shrug. She turned and lurched back up the street the way she had come. The vocates met each other’s eye and nodded.
They had to risk it, despite Klÿgnaru’s warning.
Upslope from the town, the mountain split into a narrow ravine. Aloê had a nightmarish sense of repeating the past—a past unpleasantly thick with venomous sheep and fire-breathing elephant-goats. But they passed through the ravine without incident. Masösa stopped on the far side, unhooded herself, and turned her ratlike face back toward the ravine.
The slopes above them were riddled with holes. In each one stood a hooded rat-sized figure. And in a boulder nearby there was a wide dark recess, about ankle high, like the sewer hole in a street.
No face there, not yet, but it was to this hole that Masösa spoke: “Lord, I have brought the one you commanded me to bring.”
“Plus one,” Aloê snarled.
“There is also this woman, as you see, you who see all,” Masösa added, with tautological subservience.
; Something was taking shape in the sewer-hole: a hooded head, the face enveloped in shadow, only the ratlike tip of the nose and the red burning eyes visible.
“Thyläkotröx, you who walk below, we welcome your manifestation,” said Masösa breathlessly, and bowed low. The hooded rats in the recesses of the cliff all chittered together.
Masösa bowed even lower. She sobbed in pain or religious ecstasy. She frantically pulled away the long robe she wore. She was nude underneath, crouching now, and Aloê looked with some horror on her body, with rat-haunches, and a long naked pink tail, and coarse gray hairs covering her distorted trunk. She had six nipples, like a female rat.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Her back was rippling, changing as they watched. A mouth with two enormous white lips appeared on her shoulder. It had long needle-teeth and a slender white tongue. The voice of the god spoke through it as Masösa hissed through her teeth.
“Welcome, young Ambrosius,” said the god.
“Eh,” said Morlock, delighting Aloê no end.
“You are discourteous,” the god’s mouth said, as Masösa grovelled in pain. “But no matter. You have done me a great kindness in the slaying of my enemy, the One, and it is my nature to reward my friends and punish my enemies. So it must be, for such as me. Thence comes the tal that sustains us and gives us our power.”
“Gods, you mean,” Morlock said.
“The gods of Kaen, and many another god. Whether the Two Powers (may they be damned to the emptiness of unworship) are the same, we do not know. But they are our enemy, and yours, too, and so we have a common enemy again.”
“Are the Two Powers hostile to the Wardlands? Why?”
“I neither know, nor care. But you did not attend to my meaning, Ambrosius. The Two Powers hate you in particular. They seek you up and down the world. They send out the weaker gods like dogs to trail you and those who share your fiery blood. I could gain a great reward, and access of power and freedom you cannot conceive, simply by telling them where you are.”
“Then,” Morlock said.
The god’s mouth on Masösa’s back made a hissing sound of irritation. “I visualize that you mean, ‘Why don’t you tell them, then?’ But I hate the Two Powers more than I hate you, or this traitorous follower of mine, or those rock-rats above that are my only remaining congregation.