The Wide World's End

by James Enge

  CHAPTER THREE

  Death of a Summoner

  Ten days before he was murdered, Summoner Earno woke with a dry throat and a guilty conscience. The sun was rising over the high Hrithaens to the west. He had told Deor to wake him when the stars spun around to midnight so that he could watch over their charges through part of the darkness. But here it was, deep into day, and he was just waking up.

  He shook off his bedroll and leaped to his feet to see Deor standing beside him.

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Rokhlan!” the dwarf said soothingly. “I and the sentinel mannikins watched through the night. The Khnauronts have been fed, and I was just about to make a little breakfast for myself.”

  “You should have woken me, my friend. You need rest, too.”

  “Yes, but I can sleep while I walk.”

  “You—” Earno peered at the dwarvish thain. “In fact? That’s not just an expression?”

  “In fact. Not day after day, but occasionally I should be able give you a full night’s rest. You looked like you needed it last night.”

  “Thanks. I did.”

  Deor’s notion of breakfast always involved hard-boiled eggs and sausage tarts, when they could be procured. Eggs were difficult meat to transport on a walking tour such as theirs, but Deor had packed away a surprising number of sausage tarts in a box lined with a kind of preservative gel. Earno found the tarts inedible when they were fresh, much less when one had to brush off fragments of salty gel. But there was tea and flatbread and broth to be had; they met Earno’s modest needs for the present. He thought longingly of a cookhouse near his home in A Thousand Towers: he promised himself a month straight of suppers there when he got home (a promise he would not be able to keep).

  Earno did not know he was about to be murdered. He avoided casting mantias or other kinds of foretelling because he was aware of the danger of causal loops, with a prediction effecting itself through his own reaction to the prediction.

  But he had not risen to the level of Summoner of the Outer Lands without attaining some depth of insight. And what insight he had was making him restless, very restless, indeed, as if time were running out—for himself, for the people he cared about, for the whole world. And his reason confirmed what his insight was whispering.

  He thought of something he could do, something he should have done before leaving the Northhold: warn Morlock of a particular danger. He could write a letter and give it to Deor. That way, even if something happened. . . . He didn’t finish the thought. That, too, might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  As he herded the pitifully few surviving Khnauronts southward, he composed the letter in his mind. The Khnauronts were completely passive, willing to go anywhere they were directed, and the wardlet woven around them kept them from wandering off the Road. They had a halfmonth left to travel, he guessed, but the Road was clear and straight. He sounded judicious phrases through his mind until he was satisfied with them. When it was time to call a halt for the night, the letter was done: all that remained was to put the words down on paper, and he did that by coldlight during the first watch. By the time he woke Deor for the second watch, the letter was written in dry ink, sealed, and safely tucked away. His conscience was never completely clear, but it was a little clearer as he went to sleep that night.

  The fifth day before he was murdered, Earno received a note through the message sock he always carried with him.

  The psychic weight of a message sock was not something most were willing to burden themselves with. A sock that had been anchored to a location or a vessel was one thing, but a seer transferring a sock from one place to another had to devote part of his strength to continually sustain the talic stranj between locations that allowed the socks to function, so that a note inscribed on the palimpsest attached to one sock was instantly mirrored on the palimpsest of its twin. Earno felt, as summoner, he could not afford to be out of contact with the Graith, so he always carried one, paired to a sock in the Arch of Tidings, back in A Thousand Towers. Lernaion, in contrast, rather enjoyed being inaccessible when it suited him, and Bleys travelled so rarely that the issue hardly ever came up.

  The sock message that day was from Noreê. She told about the stranger Kelat whom she had captured, and concluded, I am coming north to meet you. Keep to the Road.

  Earno read with interest the note on the palimpsest, and laughed when he came to the end. He showed the letter to Deor and said, “Noreê is a fine vocate, but a touch high-handed. Anyway, what would anyone do but keep to the Road? Is there another way south to the city?”

  “She is the enemy to my blood,” Deor said flatly, as if that was the limit of his interest in discussing Noreê. This choked off a possible line of conversation between them, and they spent most of that day in silence as Earno meditated on the burden of long hates, such as Noreê had for the Ambrosii, or the dwarves had for Noreê. Was it a weakness in him that he could not hate so long and steadily? Once he had done so. He could hardly regret it: the exile of Merlin and Earno’s ascent to the rank of summoner were the result. But nowadays he liked most people he knew. He appreciated their oddness. He felt himself to be quite ordinary, perhaps too ordinary.

  On the morning after he had been murdered, Earno Dragonkiller, Summoner of the Inner Lands, awoke with a searing headache and a bad taste in his mouth. He coughed up a clot of red-black phlegm and spent a shocked moment staring at it as it lay glistening like jelly in his hand.

  “What’s that?” his friend Deor syr Theorn wondered. “Breakfast?”

  “Blecch,” muttered Earno and wiped his hand on the dry, brown grass.

  They saw to it that their charges had something to eat and drink, and then breakfasted themselves. Earno’s bacon and porridge had a difficult time making its way down his throat. There was a soreness there, a swelling, and nothing tasted right. He scraped his bowl out on the ground, packed it away, and started the task of herding their charges through another day.

  The wardlet around the prisoners was choosy about who or what it let past. That was convenient in preventing runaways. It was inconvenient when the Road passed through a wood. Sometimes they had to broaden the way, with Earno or Deor lopping limbs off trees while the other watched the prisoners in case they made a collective run for freedom (though they seemed disinclined to do so).

  Earno found this work interesting: he rarely got to work with his hands anymore. But it was not very interesting; nothing was, somehow. He thought about the porridge and bacon he had failed to finish that morning. Worth killing for? Worth dying for? (Earno did not doubt that the Graith would decide to kill the captured invaders.)

  The whole day was like that damn porridge: more than he wanted; a little difficult to get down.

  The second day after he had been murdered went a little easier. Eating was a chore, but no longer a pain. And before they had walked long in the morning, they were joined by Noreê, who true to her word, had ridden up from A Thousand Towers to see if they needed any help.

  It was interesting, but not very interesting, to hear Deor and Noreê spar with frosty courtesies. It was interesting to taste the relief he felt when the responsibility for the prisoners was shared by another Guardian. Their future deaths had been weighing heavily on Earno’s mind (not that he thought that they deserved to live, just that the delay was a little wearing, a little wearing). The horse she rode was interesting: a gray palfrey all the way from Three Hills.

  But not very interesting. Something had gone out of the world, some flavor or color that gave intensity to life, and Earno wasn’t sure what it was.

  On the fourth day after he had been murdered, Earno almost felt himself again. Whatever had afflicted him was nearly past, he felt—and that was true, although he didn’t know what it was. He was borrowing Noreê’s gray palfrey to see if he could put it through its paces. He looked up and saw Morlock and Aloê riding toward him, on the other side of a narrow stream, tributary to the River Ruleijn.

  Morlock rode even more awkward
ly that Earno did, and that almost made the old summoner smile. When he saw Morlock he was always reminded simultaneously of the proudest and most shameful times in his life, and somehow that made him almost smile as well. He didn’t feel much of anything these days; he had borne the burden of a great secret so long he could hardly feel it, or anything, anymore. But it was a comfort to remember that he had once felt so intensely; it gave him hope he would do so again. The thought of sharing his secret, sharing the burden, was also a relief.

  They were smiling at him, raising their left hands in greeting. He raised his own in response, and now he did smile. He urged the gray palfrey forward and it stepped down into the middle of the stream and stopped, the water foaming below the horse’s knees.

  Something was wrong. Morlock and Aloê were looking at him, eyes wide with shock. There was a warmth, a wetness running down his neck and chest, staining his white tunic red, mingling with the coarse gray hair of the horse’s mane. He heard himself gulp air, although his mouth was closed. He reached up to feel the rough, blood-spewing, lipless mouth that gaped in his throat.

  Then he fell from the horse’s back into the clear, cool water.

  At last, in the last moment, it returned, that strange bittersweetness, the tang of life, of really feeling and being. The bright, crystalline color of the mountain stream, the taste of his own blood in his mouth. He was alive again, wholly alive. Then, on the fourth day after he was murdered, Earno died.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Last Station

  Fleeing from a nightmare, Morlock awoke entangled in the limbs of his glorious, darkly golden wife. He had, for one moment, the cruel comfort of believing that all of it was a nightmare: the dying sun, the cruel war with the Khnauronts, the deaths of so many of his friends, the dreadful murder of Earno.

  But, as he lay still to avoid waking Aloê, he looked out the window at the cool silver-blue sky of spring and sorted the darkness of his dream from the darkness in the waking world. They were not dissimilar. He hoped that didn’t mean they were true dreams.

  Aloê was dreaming, too, and from the expression on her sleeping face the dreams were as unpleasant as his. He was moved to wake her when she whispered, “Don’t go! You’ll never come back! You’ll never come back!”

  He wondered if she were in rapture, adrift in the chill winds from the future. “I have gone before,” he said quietly, “and I always came back.”

  “This is different,” she sighed. She seemed to stop breathing entirely and he was moved to alarm. But before he could act, she opened her golden eyes and looked straight into his.

  “Bad dream?” he asked.

  “‘Good morning, beloved,’” is the usual greeting,” she remarked, “but I suppose when a couple is entering their second century of marriage—”

  “Good morning, beloved. Did you have a bad dream?”

  “Yes, sweetheart. And you, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yours first.”

  “Can’t remember much. My leg hurt. I was sick and—I was sick or something—”

  “Don’t get coy on me now, Vocate.”

  “I was vomiting. It was dark and . . . and you weren’t there. You were never going to be there.”

  She was silent for a long time. “In mine,” she said, “I saw you going away in the dark. The further you went, the older you got. You were all twisted and horrible. Yes! Yes! Even more than you are now! I couldn’t stop you. I don’t know why.”

  “In the dream, were you all right?”

  “What do you mean? Alive, healthy, or what?”

  “All that.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. “Yes, I think so. I was sorry to lose you, but I was alive.”

  He sighed in relief.

  She looked at him quizzically. “Is my death the worst thing you can imagine?”

  “The very worst.”

  She smiled gently and said, “Beloved.” But he wasn’t surprised when she didn’t say, I feel the same way, because he knew she didn’t. She did say, finally, “We’ve lost so much. We mustn’t lose each other.”

  He held her close. They lay together in silence for a while until they heard Deor shouting somewhere in the stairway, “I don’t suppose anyone will want to GET SOME BREAKFAST BEFORE THEY GO TO STATION?”

  The hardy Westhold steeds that they had ridden south were still enjoying the meager comforts of Tower Ambrose’s stables, but they decided to walk to Station rather than ride there. Deor accompanied them, as their thain-attendant, but he would not be allowed to speak at Station: that was a right for full members of the Graith, which Deor never intended to be.

  Aloê and Morlock had broached the subject to him only last night. There were vacancies among the vocates, after the defeat of the Khnauronts, and no one among the thains was as well-respected as Deor. But he laughed at their offer of promotion. “Look, harvenen,” he said. “I am here, at the behest of the Elder of Theorn clan, to serve your interests and keep out of his beard (may it never grow thin). How could I do either of those things as a vocate? No, shut your faces. When the time comes that I can no longer be a Guardian, I will go home and raise children under Thrymhaiam, as God Creator intended.”

  The day was not warm, although summer was approaching. No one felt like discussing the weather, though, so they walked mostly in silence down the winding elm-lined streets until they ran into Vocate Jordel and his brother Baran, accompanied by a gray-caped cloud of thains. No silence could long withstand Jordel’s relentless assault and they were soon talking about everything under the sun, except the state of the sun.

  Where the River Road joined Shortmarket Street, they came across a company of thains armed with long spears. At their head strode bitter white Vocate Noreê. In the midst walked a dirty ragged figure, manacles on his arms and legs.

  Morlock felt, and felt strongly, that anger was a weakness. But he felt its red fire infecting his eyes. He stepped in front of the troupe and said to Noreê, “Who is this?”

  Stiffly she replied, “The invader I captured at Big Rock. He is a stranger in the land and here for no good purpose.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know things you will never understand!”

  “Everybody does. Everybody knows something that someone else does not, and never will.” He turned away from her and said to the thain nearest him, “Stand aside.”

  He was prepared to draw Tyrfing and fight if need be, but there was no need. Noreê was shouting behind him, and the hapless thain glanced in terror back and forth between Noreê and Morlock. Morlock simply waited, and in the end the thain stood aside.

  “Stranger,” he said to the chained man, “what’s your name?”

  “Kelat,” said the stranger vaguely. “I think. I think that’s part of it, anyway.”

  “You must go before the Graith and account for yourself.”

  “So the vocate tells me. I will, if I can.”

  “My name is Morlock.”

  “I’ve heard that name, I think.”

  “Eh. Show me those.” Morlock pointed at the manacles.

  Kelat lifted his arms and Morlock looked keenly at the fastenings. It would be easy enough to pick the locks, but. . . . He took the locks on each of the manacles between thumb and forefinger and twisted them until they broke.

  “You may be king in the North,” Noreê shouted behind him, “but you are not king here!”

  Morlock ignored her blasphemy. He crouched down and broke the locks on Kelat’s legs as well. As he rose to his feet, Kelat shook off his chains and said, “Thanks.”

  “It’s nothing,” Morlock replied. “Jordel,” he said, over his lower shoulder, “where is the nearest bathhouse? Zelion’s isn’t it?”

  “How would I know? Why ask me?”

  “You have lived in this city for three hundred years, and your house doesn’t have a rain room.”

  “I keep meaning to have one put in. . . . I see your point. Yes, Zelion’s, and he’s open
in the mornings.”

  “Then.” Morlock closed his eyes. “Deortheorn. You will take Kelat here to Zelion’s bathhouse. See that he’s cleaned up—” there was a smear of dried blood on his temple “—and his wounds tended to. Get him some clean clothes to wear and get him breakfast. Then bring him to the Chamber of the Graith.”

  “Akhram hav, rokhlan,” Deor replied. It was an act of significant discourtesy, according to dwarvish standards, to speak in a language not shared by all present. But Deor always claimed that courtesy was overrated, and this was one occasion when Morlock agreed with him.

  “I forbid this,” Noreê said. Morlock turned to meet her ice-blue eyes.

  “It doesn’t matter that you do,” Morlock said. “But if you choose to send one or more of your spearmen to keep watch on the prisoner, I won’t object.”

  “No,” said Noreê thoughtfully. “Let it be on your head when the Graith calls for him and he is not found.”

  Morlock grunted and gestured at Deor.

  “Come along, you dangerous monster,” Deor said cheerily. “Let’s get you fixed up. I’m Deor syr Theorn, by the way.”

  “I’m Kelat. At least . . . I think I am. . . .”

  The dwarf led the mystified stranger away up Shortmarket Street. Morlock looked again at Noreê and strode through the spear-thains as if they were not there. He and the others walked on to the Chamber of the Graith while Noreê and her thains lagged a little behind.

  “That was well done,” Jordel said in an unwontedly low tone of voice (for him). “I knew she was keeping this fellow prisoner, but I never thought to ask how they were treating him, I’m ashamed to say.”

  “We all share that shame,” Morlock said.

  “Was kind of hoping for a fight,” Baran admitted grudgingly. Morlock punched his massive arm and said, “Another time.”

  “I wish you hadn’t knelt before him,” Aloê said, after a brief silence, and Jordel laughed as if this were a joke. But Morlock was pretty sure it was not. She cared much for appearances; they’d had many bitter conversations about such things.