by James Enge
CHAPTER TWO
Blood’s Price
Grief is love. That’s the deadly thing about it. You cannot live with grief chewing away at your insides like a cancer. The pain is too great. No one can stand it. But to kill the grief, you would have to kill your love for the one you lost. That is a survival too much like death: to be alive, without love, without caring. Even if you could do it, you would not.
It was fortunate, in a way, that Aloê had been wounded, and that some carnivorous Khnauront had fed from afar on her life. (That was what they told her had happened.) She hardly had the strength to live or grieve. She felt them, grief and the longing to live, felt them struggling within her, shadows fighting in the sandy emptiness of her heart, and it was all she could really feel. But she didn’t even feel that much. Her life was ebbing and she was grateful, in a dry, gray way.
Morlock was often there. She sometimes saw Naevros, too, and Deor, and Rynyrth. Once she asked one of them, she could not remember which, where Thea was, and while they hesitated, she remembered and turned her face to the wall.
And once she heard Morlock saying, “My life is hers. Take it all, if there is need.”
And Deor was there, too, with his broad face made for laughing, but he wasn’t laughing now as he said, “And mine. Blood has no price!”
“I won’t be a part of this!” said a third person angrily. Aloê didn’t know her. She was wearing the saffron robes of an initiate to the Skein of Healing, though. They were usually smiling, as if they knew some secret that you didn’t, but this woman was not smiling. The secret in her mind had turned unpleasant.
“Get out, then,” Rynyrth said impatiently. “We don’t need you here.”
“I cannot permit—”
“Lady, you stand on the western slopes of Thrymhaiam and I am the daughter of Oldfather Tyr syr Theorn. You do not permit me or deny me here. Go!”
The lady in yellow left and Rynyrth turned to Morlock. “Do you think it will work?” she asked him in Dwarvish.
As dry and empty as Aloê felt, she nearly laughed at that. If Morlock had made it, it would work. Whatever it was.
Morlock said, “Unclear. The pattern has been renewed, and seems to be effective. But the trigger for the spell is the desire for life. If she has lost that. . . .”
“We must try.”
“Yes.”
“Who . . . ?”
“Who do you think?” Morlock asked impatiently. “Who will die if she doesn’t live? I know you two love her also. But it’s not the same.”
“Then!”
Aloê felt two pairs of hard, blunt, dwarvish hands lift her out of bed. As she stood, waveringly, on her own feet—not sure she wanted to stand, not willing to say she was unwilling—someone put something into her hand.
She looked at it uncomprehendingly. If Morlock had made this, it was not up to his usual standards. A spiderweb of silvery seams covered its surface, as if it had been shattered and repaired. It was a wand, about the length of her forearm, but not as heavy as it should have been. The end pointed away from her had a sort of clawed mouth. . . .
It was one of the lifetaking wands.
She looked up to see Morlock standing in front of her. He had a knife if his hand. When her eyes met his, he slashed his bare forearm with the knife and fiery blood sprang forth.
The two shadows struggling within her struggled no longer. Finally, they agreed on something. She learned then that grief is not only love; it is also hate—hate for whatever lives when the loved one is dead. The longing to live and the longing to punish everything alive had found something to agree on.
The lifetaking wand sang in her hand and she knew the evil ecstasy of stealing someone else’s life.
She cried out, in delight and horror, and Morlock fell to the ground in a shower of burning blood.
As she came wholly alive she realized what she was doing and she threw the wand from her as hard as she could.
She ran to Morlock where he had fallen and knelt beside him. He was breathing at least, but his eyes were clenched shut and his breathing was broken by croaking sounds, as if he were choking on phlegm.
She ripped a piece of cloth off his shirt and carefully bound up the gaping wound in his arm. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to tend to his injuries, so she managed to do it without burning herself. She put her hand on his face and waited for him to stop choking.
His breathing grew more even. His eyes opened and looked into hers.
“That was stupid,” she said.
He coughed once, twice, and sat up. “Worked,” he said.
“You could have died.”
He looked at her with those luminous gray eyes and said nothing.
“Sorry to interrupt this tender moment,” Deor said gruffly, holding out his cape, “but this is fireproof. And you’re dripping fire all over the place. And we are surrounded by pine trees.”
Morlock smiled with half his face and took the cape, wrapping it around his wounded arm.
“So,” she said, remembering words that had come to her through the gray fog of despair and grief, “you brought me to Thrymhaiam?”
“Yes,” said Morlock. “Our harven-kin insisted. In fact—”
He stood. She looked up at him astonished as he reached down and picked her up. He carried her in his unwounded arm out the door of the little hut and into the thin golden light of the ailing sun.
They stood on a steep slope on the western side of Thrymhaiam. The valley below was full of folk—mandrakes, dwarves, men and women, all waiting there, waiting for something.
Morlock lifted Aloê up and held her triumphantly over his head in the thin sunshine. “Put me down, you champion idiot!” she shouted.
The crowds below roared. It was like a storm at sea; it went on and on; there was no stopping it.
Aloê was amazed. Why did it mean so much to them? Was she, as a person, so important to them? Had she come to stand, in their minds, for all their dead and wounded, and their triumph in her healing was a way to overcome their grief? Was it because she was Morlock’s mate?
She didn’t like that thought. But she remembered a voice saying in the night, They will make that crooked man king someday. At least in the North. And she remembered another voice saying, Shut your lying mouth.
She wanted to agree with the second voice. But she began to fear that the first voice might be right.
The crowds were still cheering when Morlock turned and carried her back into the lodge. He laid her gently down in the hateful bed where she had spent so many empty hours, but it was not so bad now. Thea was still dead and Aloê still grieved for her, but the spring sunlight was pale on the windowsill, reminding her that the world itself was dying. She had work to do, while her own life lasted, however long that was.
She was alive enough to feel hungry and tired, though. A weidhkyrr named Khêtlynn brought her a bowl of broth and a mug of beer from the cooking lodge of the weidhkyrren, and she gratefully accepted them. After Khêtlynn left she napped until the woman in yellow returned to sew up Morlock’s wound. The healer wore odd metal-mesh gloves to do the work. The thin sunlight and flecks of bloody fire glittered on the metal as the healer worked patiently, and Aloê nodded off again.
When she awoke, she found that Morlock was in bed beside her. Horseman was rising, its blank eye staring through the western window of the lodge. In the unforgiving light Morlock looked uglier than ever, and so tired—his eyes like bruises as he snored there. She remembered with wonder what he had done for her, and what he had said about her as she was dying. Now part of her life was his. She felt the honor; she felt also the burden. She kissed him gently on his weary eyes and slipped out of bed.
It was chilly for a spring night, but she wore her red vocate’s cloak, wrapping it close around her. The grass on the slope was winter-dry and sparse, hissing against her shoes. Horseman was not in the sky, but great Chariot stood somber in the east, and little Trumpeter was high in the western sky, still full of l
ight and hope. The major and minor moon gave her plenty of light to pick her way down the slope. She wasn’t sure where she was headed but she had to get out and see something.
There was a camp in the valley below, almost like a town full of lights and people. She drifted toward it.
There was a fire surrounded by fire-eyed Gray Folk at the edge of the camp. They rose and spoke to her politely in their crunchy language, called her harven, and asked her to sit with them. She begged off, saying she wanted to shake her legs a bit. The idiom made their eyes stretch wide and she had the sense they were about to laugh. But they didn’t laugh, and when one of them said, “Our word of respect to your husband, Ruthen Morlock,” they all bowed their serpentine heads and touched their scaly chests. A voice whispered in her ear, They will make that crooked man a king someday. She turned away from them and it, striding deeper into the camp.
She saw Naevros syr Tol coming toward her up the narrow path between shelters, and she wondered what they would say to each other. Had he been among the crowd, cheering with the rest, when Morlock had held her up triumphantly in the sun? Had he been wounded in the battle? Who else that they knew and loved had been killed in the stupid war now ended?
He brushed past her without speaking. That astonished her. She almost turned and spoke to him, but then strode proudly on instead. Perhaps the bond between them was finally broken. Perhaps it was time for that: it was a time of endings.
Suddenly weary, she leaned against a wooden booth. She felt tears on her face, but only an emptiness inside her, frighteningly like the grayness of despair and near-death she had recently escaped.
“What brings you wandering into the night, Rokhlan?” asked a familiar voice.
She opened her eyes to see Deor looking up at her.
“Ath, Rokhlan!” she replied politely. “I needed to walk and breathe some fresh air. I was tired of that house of sickness.”
“I understand that,” Deor said, “but have you overdone it, perhaps.”
“No.” She stood tall and smiled down at him. “No! But . . . something bitter just happened to me.”
He said nothing, but smiled and waited. He was a wordy fellow, but a good listener—a rare combination.
She found herself saying, “I walked past Naevros just now. I think he saw me—he must have seen me. But he didn’t say anything to me.” She halted then, afraid that what she had said might sound disloyal somehow.
He put his hand on her arm and said, “It has been a hard time for everyone. I assure you, Naevros was as worried about you as any of us. But relief from one pain can make us newly conscious of another.”
“I suppose.” She gripped his arm with her free hand and he released her. “And what have you been keeping busy with?” she asked. That he was busy was a given: she had known Deor almost as long as she had Morlock, and she had rarely seen the dwarf at rest.
“We’ve got to herd the surviving Khnauronts down to A Thousand Towers where the Graith can have a look at them and decide whether to expel them or kill them.”
“No doubt.”
“Well, Lernaion and Earno are sitting with their legs crossed, weaving a little version of the Wards for each of the prisoners. Then they are going to stitch them together into a kind of ghostly honeycomb. Then they’ll be more herdable, you see.”
Aloê thought about this plan for a moment, then said, “It must be an enormous undertaking. Surely there are hundreds of survivors from the battle.”
“No longer.”
“Oh.”
“I guess you mean, ‘Why not?’”
“I guess I do.”
“The Khnauronts without their lifetakers are a fragile bunch; there isn’t much that keeps them alive. All the wounded died. We had binders from the Skein of Healing working night and day to no avail.”
“Odd.”
“It’s odder than that, harven. Many of the unwounded folded their hands and died. They looked—that is—”
“Yes?”
“They looked like you looked, until today. Empty. They’d given up. I’m sorry—”
“No, I understand. But some survive.”
“Yes! We made them soup, you see. Some ate it when it was set before them, some didn’t. The ones who ate lived.”
“Perhaps you should have offered the others pie. Not everyone likes soup.”
“Eh! I wasn’t born to run a refectory for ghouls. They can eat soup or starve, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s not the funny thing, Harven Aloê.”
“There’s a funny thing?”
“Well, more of an oddly disgusting thing.”
“That is a little different.”
“Shut up, can’t you? I’m trying to talk here!”
She bowed low, waving her arms in a parody of a courteous flourish.
“I like how you put that,” Deor said. “Anyway, you know how Southers cut up someone to find out how they died?”
Aloê smiled. She had been born on an island off the southern coast of Laent—about as far south as you could go and still be in the Wardlands. “I’ve never actually done it myself, but—”
“God Avenger!” whispered Deor, genuinely dismayed. He put a hand over his mouth, as if to prevent more offensive words from pouring out.
“Harven Deor!” she said patiently. She grabbed his free hand and held it in both of hers.
He slowly lowered his hand from his mouth. “It’s just that I forget sometimes—no, never mind!”
“Never mind it, Deor, truly.”
“What I really meant was, it’s those strange women from New Moorhope who do it, the yellow-robed healers.”
Some of those women were men, but Aloê wasn’t surprised that the difference wasn’t clear to a dwarf. It wasn’t always clear to her, even back when she was studying the arts at New Moorhope. She nodded.
“They opened up some of these dead Khnauronts, you see. Actually, I think they opened them all up. And the ones who died from not eating, well, they couldn’t have gotten any good from food anyway. Their innards or vittles, the parts that are used for nourishment—I don’t know what the Wardic word is—”
“Use the Dwarvish one.”
“Their shykkump.”
Aloê thought she recognized the word—it represented the tract from the gullet to the anus, if she wasn’t mistaken. She nodded.
“All that,” the dwarf continued, “was useless, and much of it was gone, absorbed back into the walls of the body.”
“All right. That is oddly disgusting.”
“Yes. They were dead from the moment they lost their lifetakers. Lernaion thinks that the ones who could still eat were just recent recruits—their shykkumpen would have dried up over time, too. But Earno thinks that it might have been a rank-marker, with the inferior Khnauronts slurping down soup, and the superior ones feeding off their tal.”
“They seem to be much at odds lately.” (She remembered: They will make that crooked man king someday. And: Shut your lying mouth.)
“The summoners? Indeed. I could almost wish that Bleys were here to step in between them. But the downside would be. . . .”
“That Bleys would be here, yes.” The oldest summoner was loved by few, if any, of his fellow Guardians.
Deor took her to see the captive Khnauronts, in an open field on the far side of the camp. They lay or sat each one alone, and Aloê thought she could see the faint imprint of something unseen in the pale, dry grass around them. Some were sitting upright with folded hands. Others held bowls of soup in their hands, lowering their faces to the liquid and slurping it up like animals. Yet others lay staring at the sky or sleeping.
The field was ringed with spear-armed, gray-caped thains. At a near corner, she saw the Summoner Earno, his legs crossed, his eyes glowing with rapture. Far off, across the field, she could barely descry another white-mantled figure: Lernaion, she supposed.
The wet succulent sounds of slurping were the only ones in the moonlit field.
“Do any of them talk?
” she asked Deor.
“They can’t!” Deor pointed to his throat. “No, um, vyrrmidhen.”
“No larynxes.” How did they communicate with each other? Did they not communicate at all? It was strange indeed. “They will have to be examined on the Witness Stone.”
“So the summoners say.”
Aloê’s stomach moved audibly within her.
Deor glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. “Queasy?”
“Hungry,” she admitted. The sounds of the soup-sucking ghouls were indeed disgusting, but the smell of the broth drifting through the cold air was like a breath of meaty heaven.
“God Avenger strike me dead.”
“Avert!” she said automatically. “But do you suppose . . . ?”
“Of course! The Guardians, the Gray Folk, the Silent Folk all have refectories set up. Or we could go under Thrymhaiam.”
“No . . . I should return up the hill to—” Morlock “—the sleephouse.”
“Come in here. We’ll get you something better than soup.”
She found herself sitting on a long bench, eating some sort of roasted bird and the most delicious bread since bread was invented. The rest of the hall was dark, and Deor sat beside her, talking cheerily of this and that, eating roasted mushrooms and drinking wine. He persuaded her to drink some of the wine, and the drink might have been a mistake on her part. She was already weary, and the wine sent her right to the edge of sleep. She had little flashes of awareness as Deor half led, half carried her up the long slope to the sleephouse. Then he was tucking her into bed beside the still-snoring Morlock.
“I’m off in the morning with Earno,” he whispered. “If I don’t see you then, I’ll see you in A Thousand Towers. Be well, and good fortune to you, harven.”
“Harven,” she muttered, and then he was gone. She wished she had sent a word of goodbye to Earno. She regretted it when she awoke alone, long after noon, and knew they must be gone. She regretted it still more when she realized later that she would never speak to Earno again.