The Wide World's End

by James Enge

  “You see it, harven?” Rynyrth hissed in her ear. “These beasts eat their wounded, like pus-rats. Those clawed sticks: those are the lifetakers.”

  More Khnauronts flooded into view. There were very many of them—hundreds or thousands—many times the little company stationed on the Hill of Storms.

  But they were not alone. Beyond them, driving them, came a cohort of bearded dwarves. They marched in close ranks; each dwarf bore a glass shield in one hand and a spiked silver mallet. Floating above them like banners, supported by nothing Aloê could see, were coldlights illumining the battle.

  The dwarven soldiers used the spikes on their mallets to stab, but swung the weights to break weapons or lifetakers when they could. Their progress was slow but relentless.

  The slopes opposite them suddenly bristled with gray shadows and fire-red eyes: the Gray Folk, driving another mob of Khnauronts before them.

  “The moment will be soon,” Rynyrth said. “When they know we are here, blocking their retreat, they will charge the hill or attempt to flee up the valley to our south. We must be ready.”

  “We should tell the others,” Thea said.

  “My people know, and they will tell their allies, as I tell you.”

  Now, at last, they heard the distant sound of shouting. Opposite the Hill of storms, to the west, Aloê saw a cloud of torches, dark human shapes among them. She thought some of them were carrying pitchforks.

  It was the so-called Silent Folk. They came from cities and towns and had no strong allegiances or families to protect them, so they banded together in the League of Silent Men and the Guild of Silent Women. A few decades ago they had settled a valley in the North.

  They were farmers with no great sense of discipline or purpose or the dangers of war. They could only be armed with improvised weapons. But they had come to defend their land in this moment of danger. Of all those in this fight, they were the most at risk.

  At their head, as she had expected and feared, Aloê saw a crooked, red-cloaked figure; he carried a sword in each hand and no shield. Another red-cloaked form, taller and more regular, stood beside him with shield and sword.

  Before she could say, even to herself, Don’t do that, you idiots! the two red-cloaked figures leapt into the thick of the retreating Khnauronts and began cutting a swathe through their midst. When the dwarves saw this, they finally began to chant, “Ath, Rokhleni! Ath, Ambrosius! Ath, Naevros! Ath! Ath!” Their line bent into a wedge, and the sharp end drove deep into the Khnauronts.

  “Ambrose! Ambrose! The bond of blood!” called out the Gray Folk in fell voices as they dropped down on the Khnauronts like an avalanche from the hills.

  The Khnauronts were in full retreat. The descent of the Gray Folk had closed off the retreat to the south. They turned toward the slopes of the Hill of Storms.

  “Now!” called Rynyrth, lifting her own bow to the ready. “Sort friend from foe and strike for your blood, harven or ruthen!”

  The songbows sang; the gravebolts flew, bright with moonlight against the dark ground; ragged ranks of skeletal Khnauronts went down in the cold light of the dwarvish banners. Aloê saw with disgust that the Khnauronts did indeed use their wands on each other, “eating their own wounded,” as Rynyrth had put it. Every time she saw a Khnauront do that, she aimed a gravebolt at him. Let the eaters be eaten.

  Morlock and Naevros’ wild whirling course had carried them through the mob of Khnauronts, and they turned again to strike into the heart of the fragmenting mob.

  Now the ragged wave of Khnauronts was climbing the slope of Tunglskin. The gravebolts thinned their ranks, but the survivors fed on the tal of the fallen. The enemies were close enough that Aloê could actually see their black wounds closing like mouths. Their faces were full of ecstasy rather than fear or hate.

  When there were only a few paces between the foremost of the enemy and the line woven of dwarves and Guardians, Aloê gripped her bow with her right hand just below its runic rose, wielding it like a club; she drew her knife with her left. Then she leaped out of the line and tore into the Khnauronts, smashing their wands with the weight of her bow, stabbing and parrying with the long knife.

  Rynyrth followed her, shouting, “Ath, Rokhlan! Khai, Oaij! Ath! Ath!”

  Glancing about to be ware of friend and foe, Aloê saw that Rynyrth was also wielding her bow like a club. For a stabbing weapon, she carried a forked spear of the kind the Khnauronts used.

  Lernaion’s bitter, dark eyes were lit with rapture. He stood wavering, like a man about to fall asleep on his feet. But any Khnauront that approached him fell lifeless to the ground.

  Earno had seized a fallen Khnauront by the heels and was swinging him in a circle, striking down his enemies with his enemy.

  There were moments of wild chaos as all the lines of battle met and mixed on the dark slopes of Tunglskin.

  Then the surviving Khnauronts were throwing down their weapons and speaking or weeping with dry, birdlike clicks. They didn’t seem to be surrendering so much as despairing. These had no lifetaker wands. The Khnauronts with wands fought to the death, or until their wands were broken.

  Now the battle had ended, but the chaos continued to swirl in Aloê’s mind and heart. She was wounded, she saw: twice in the left side, once in the left arm. She had lost her knife somewhere. She felt frail and crunchy, like a dry cicada husk.

  Moonslit moments, separated by moonless dark. She saw Rynyrth and a band of weidhkyrren forcing the defeated Khnauronts to kneel. She saw Deor, his dark eyes fierce, his face unwontedly grim. He didn’t seem to see her, and somehow she could not speak to him.

  She heard someone speaking, almost whispering, nearby her. “They will make that crooked man king someday. At least in the North.”

  She turned toward the voice. It was Lernaion’s, and he wasn’t speaking to her. He was speaking in Earno’s ear, a dozen paces away, but somehow she could hear it, as if this were a dream. And she heard Summoner Earno’s curt response as clearly: “Shut your lying mouth.”

  She looked around for Thea. There were Guardians gathering by the two summoners, but she was not among them. She saw the Gray Folk and the Dwarves mingling on the lower slope, talking in their harsh language—like rocks breaking, she often thought. She saw Morlock and Naevros at the bottom of the slope, leaning on each other in their weariness. She would have gone to them if she had the strength, but which one should she go to? Thea would know. She would at least have an opinion.

  Aloê looked over her shoulder. At last she saw her friend, where she had fallen in the line, a pale shriveled form on the dark summit of the star-crowned hill.

  There must have been other things, but she never remembered them later, and I will not tell them now.

  PART TWO

  Rites of Spring

  I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

  Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

  The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

  And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”

  —Tennyson, “Maud”

  CHAPTER ONE

  What Really Happened

  The price of victory is work. The defeated need only flee or die, but those who win the battle must tend the battlefield like a bloody garden, and even take care of their late enemies, living or dead.

  The price of fighting a war at all is forgetfulness. In the thick of fighting, few if any have the leisure to ask how it started or why.

  In her time, Noreê had fought with sword and knife and naked fist to maintain the Guard. She would do so again. But, as she and her thains-attendant rewove the maze in the Gap of Lone, she had leisure to think of many things.

  One was how to make a stronger defense of the Maze. This was mostly a matter of geometry, redrawing the shifting lines of talic force in the Maze so that they tended to reinforce each other rather than work against each other. She developed the necessary pattern in part of an afternoon and taught i
t to her assistants that evening.

  The rest of the time she thought about this strange enemy. Had the Khnauronts, those mindless cannibals, the Strength and the Sight to shatter the Wardlands’ immemorial protections? It seemed unlikely.

  Were the Khnauronts merely shock troops, sent to pave the way for a more formidable strike force? That was Noreê’s secret fear, and to forestall it she drove herself and her attendant-thains night and day to refashion the Wards over and above the Gap of Lone.

  But as days passed, and the Maze was remade, and no new enemy came, Noreê was compelled to entertain another hypothesis.

  The attack of the Khnauronts was a distraction. Something else, someone else, had entered the Wardlands while the Maze was broken down.

  She left her thains-attendant to complete the new Maze by themselves. They were delighted by the trust she showed in them, and even more, she realized, by the prospect of her absence. Unlike Jordel, she was not the type of vocate who drew the affection and loyalty of younger Guardians—and, in fact, she rather despised the type.

  She walked at random east and south as her mood took her. As she walked, she let her mind drift away from her body in light rapture. She looked for nothing. She watched everything.

  The snows of winter were slowly receding, but the greens of spring had not yet appeared. It was oddly like a warm stretch of days in late autumn. Perhaps in this year would come the last of all autumns. She could feel the weight of the death in the world, the hunger of many who would never eat again. It spoke in the silence of her dreams, whether she waked or slept.

  She walked much, ate little, and dreamed all the time. Her course, if plotted on a map, would have looked aimless, but it had an aim in view.

  Her thinking was this: Whatever or whoever had entered the Wardlands secretly had come too long ago for conventional methods of trailing. But they had come here for some purpose. The nearer they got to their purpose, the more of a shadow it would cast in the future. That talic shadow would fall, with increasing clarity, on the present. All her unlooking was to look for that. All her indifference was to highlight that difference.

  Not many seers could feel the cold drift of talic change rebounding from a future event that might never in fact happen. But she was one, and she was here; the task was hers to do. She never shrank from such tasks, however repugnant they were.

  So she walked and dreamed and slept and dreamed and sat and dreamed and waited.

  The answer came straight to her one morning as she sat in meditation beneath a leafless maple tree. She looked up to see a man standing awkwardly in front of her. He wore a flat black cap to cover his baldness, and from the way he hid his right hand behind him she suspected he had murdered a close relative, possibly his father. He spoke hesitantly, “I’m sorry to interrupt your thought, Vocate.”

  “You haven’t.” She felt the chill breeze of the future in this sweaty, fidgety man.

  “But you are the Vocate Noreê?”

  “I am.”

  “There is—I don’t want you to think I’m a mere informer. I don’t expect to be paid, or anything.”

  “Be sure that I will not pay you. I rarely touch money. I have none with me now.”

  “Oh.” The man stood still, the fidget struck out of him at the thought of someone with no money.

  “You were going to say?” she reminded him.

  “Oh. Yeah. There’s. In the town there’s a stranger, and I don’t think he’s one of the Guarded. He hardly speaks Wardic.”

  The future-chill in her mind transferred itself to this stranger. “What is his name? Can you describe him?”

  “He says his name is Kelat, but I think he’s hiding something. He doesn’t even seem to know where he’s from.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He is taller than I am—skin paler than mine, or most people’s—hair yellowish. He is staying at Big Rock House.”

  “At the southern edge of town,” she predicted. That was what her insight told her, and the man said, “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” she said and stood, ignoring his belated offer of a hand up. She walked away.

  “And you have no money at all?” the man said plaintively.

  “Is that why you killed—for money?” Noreê said to shut him up. And it worked: she never heard him speak again.

  Insight, as Noreê knew better than most, arises from the interplay between the mind and the world of talic impressions below the level of consciousness. It was dangerous to be guided by it because it arose from the unconscious without the benefit of reason. So do actions of prejudice, of madness, of folly. To walk in the way of insight was to risk slavery to these kinds of blindness. It was one of the risks she often took for the Guarded, and she knew that they often had to suffer from her mistakes—her prejudice, madness, folly.

  But not today. The wind from the future grew colder and clearer with every step she took. She spent a few minutes in un-meditation to bind her awareness more closely to the chaos of matter and energy that most people thought of (wrongly) as reality.

  As she walked into Big Rock House she saw a blond man, of average height or a little taller, paying his score.

  “Your name is Kelat?” she asked.

  He turned to look at her. His brown eyes were vacant, like a dreamer’s. His leather jacket was stitched together from the skin of garbucks from the plains north of the Dolich Kund. It was probably older than he was. The laces in his boots were woven from shent, probably harvested from the coast of the Sea of Stones. He was almost certainly a Vraidish barbarian, one of the horde that was gradually conquering the fragments of the old Empire of Ontil.

  “I think so,” he said. “Sometimes I think I had another name. Or will have.”

  The bald man behind the counter met Noreê’s eye and wiggled his ears. Around here that was like saying, Crazy . . . but what can you do?

  What Noreê could and did do was hit Kelat on the left temple; then, while he was stunned, she took hold of his neck and stopped blood flow until he passed out.

  When Kelat was sprawled on the beery floor of Big Rock House she said to the old man, “This Kelat is an invader. His intent here is unknown. I need to take him to A Thousand Towers so that the Graith can question him on the Witness Stone.”

  “You’ll want to talk to the Arbiter of the Peace, then,” the old man said. “She can lend you a cart and horses, maybe a couple of boys to keep Kelat in line.”

  “Will you go fetch her?”

  “I don’t want to leave my cashbox.”

  “Which house is hers, then? I’ll go myself.”

  “Aren’t you the one they call Noreê?”

  “They do call me that.”

  “I guess my money’s safe with you. And I guess you’re welcome to as much of it as you want. You and your sister cured my grandson of a madness once. That was before you were in the Graith—when you were still among the Skein of Healing at New Moorhope.”

  “Ah.” Those had been simpler days. She missed them sometimes. But she did not choose to end up like her sister, who had opened up so many doors in her mind that eventually there wasn’t much of a mind left. “I’m sorry; I don’t remember your name.”

  “I think you never knew it, Vocate. It is Parell.”

  “Parell.”

  The old man flipped part of the counter back, bowed low before her, and strode off to fetch the Arbiter.

  The Arbiter was a young woman, less than two centuries old, with improbably orange hair and black eyebrows. Noreê knew much about people and what they thought, but she did not understand why people dyed their hair. Both the attendants that the Arbiter brought with her had dyed hair as well, so maybe it had something to do with the local chapter of the Arbitrate.

  They came riding in a donkey-drawn cart, and as soon as introductions were made all around, the attendants bound Kelat’s sleeping form and loaded it into the cart.

  “Do you want a force to accompany you?” the Arbiter asked, as Noreê climbed i
nto the driver’s seat.

  “Only if you want someone to drive the cart back to you,” Noreê said.

  “That’s not needful. Just return it to one of the Arbiters in A Thousand Towers. Or keep it, if it’s any use to you.”

  Noreê nodded and was about to depart when she remembered something. “Arbiter, that man who told me of Kelat. . . .”

  “Bakell. I know him.”

  “I think he’s a murderer.”

  “I think so, too. He probably killed his father, but we can’t prove it. He may have buried the corpse in his house, where we can’t get at it. What can you do?”

  “You could buy the house. Or someone else might do it on your behalf, to allay suspicion. He seems like someone who would do almost anything for money.”

  “Possibly, but then he’d just move the body and any other evidence out of the house before the sale was complete . . .”

  Noreê waited for the Arbiter to complete the thought.

  “. . . and then we could catch him at it!”

  “It seems likely,” Noreê agreed.

  “Thanks, Guardian. Ever think of joining the Arbiters?”

  “Often. Goodbye.”

  She had a bad feeling about the Arbiter—something would go wrong with her, or to her, in the near future. Noreê didn’t choose to know about it. She spoke to the donkey and it started up the town’s single street. Another word led the donkey to turn up a track leading to the Road.

  Money she did not need and could not use. It was others who paid—sometimes with their lives—when she met them. She was sorry for it, sometimes. But she did not do these things for herself; it was for the Guarded. So she told herself, not always quite believing it, as the donkey pulled the cart onto the Road and headed south, toward A Thousand Towers.

  Before she reached the city, a passing thain told her the terrible and wonderful news from up north. The Khnauronts were defeated, Thea was dead, and they spoke of Morlock Ambrosius like a king. Like a king.

  Thinking of a day in Tower Ambrose more than four generations ago now, the day Morlock Ambrosius had been born, she told herself, “I did what I could.” She knew that was true. And she added, “I will do what I must.” And that was true as well.