The Wide World's End

by James Enge

  Morlock reined in Nimber two streets away from the lockhouse, or tried to. The horse didn’t seem to want to stop, so in the end he simply undid the bindings on his pack and jumped off with it. Deor, with an undeniable degree of smugness, brought Trundle to a halt. He was about to give Morlock a demonstration of how to secure his steed with reins to a lampless lamp post, but before he got a chance to speak Trundle shook loose and followed Nimber up the dark street.

  “Where did you get those ridiculous beasts?” he asked Morlock.

  “Borrowed them from Illion,” said the other quietly.

  The horses, Westhold bred and trained, had enough sense to get home. Deor shrugged and decided not to worry about them. He was a little worried about how they would tackle the next stage of the journey, but at least it wouldn’t be on horseback.

  They soft-footed up the street but turned before they reached the crossroad that would bring them to the front of the lockhouse. They snuck up the street behind it and approached the house from the rear.

  It was too much to hope for that the back of the house would be completely unguarded. But, in fact, there were only two thains there, and they were less than attentive. Their spears were standing against the wall of a nearby house, and they sat on the curb playing dice in the pale glow of a coldlight.

  “Three crosses,” said the shorter of the two, a woman seemingly. “That’s twenty-one to you.” She handed the dice and cup to her watchmate.

  He took them and shook them and said, “I don’t like this duty.”

  “I don’t enjoy looking at your face, either.”

  “It’s nothing to do with that. You said no grudges, Krida.”

  “So I did. Are you going to roll, or just make knuckly music all night long?”

  “Rolling.” The dice clattered onto the streetstones and grew still. “Night and day. Top that, wench.”

  “I topped your mother,” said Thain Krida, accepting the dice cup and dice.

  “Who hasn’t? Shake ‘em up, Guardian.”

  Krida rattled the dice in the cup and threw. “Spider-face. Chaos in shiny nuggets! Go again?”

  “Sure. Why not? For another meat pie?”

  “I’m tired of buying you meat pies. How about a bowl of red cream?”

  “Sure. You go first: loser’s privilege. I’ll tell you what it is with this duty, Krida.”

  Krida, shaking the dice cup, guessed, “No, let me guess. Nightmares from the evil walls? Stink from the prisoners? Guilt from profiting by your watchmate’s bad luck?”

  “No. It’s this: I joined the Graith to keep the Wardlands safe. But now we have a prison. What’s next? Tax collecting? Treason trials? We get to genuflect before some self-styled king and laugh at his stupid jokes?”

  “Throwing,” said Krida flatly. After the dice skittered to a halt she said, “A snake and a bird. Not so bad.”

  “But you’re not saying anything, so I guess you think I’m a bung-biter.”

  “I do think you’re a bung-biter, but that’s not why.”

  “Answer me straight or keep the dice and play against yourself.”

  She handed him the dice and the cup, and she said, “I don’t know, Garol. I don’t like guarding a prison, either, but no one said it was permanent. Noreê says that a king is what she’s trying to prevent—those Ambrosiuses.”

  “Doesn’t she seem a little crazy to you on the subject?”

  “You didn’t know Old Ambrosius? I guess not. Listen, if Noreê, who walked against the Dark Seven, is scared of that guy, there’s reason for it. He had reason to hate Earno, and now Earno is dead, dropped dead, murdered in the middle of the Wardlands in the sight of three Guardians, and no one knows who did it! That tells you who did it. Old Ambrosius, or maybe the young one.”

  “Ah.”

  “They say he was there. I don’t like all this stuff. Dwarves and mandrakes and God Sustainer knows what else walking around the place like they belonged here. I remember when this was a free country for people—just people, not every weird shtutt that wandered over the mountains. It started to get bad when the Northhold came under the Guard. And who was responsible for that?”

  “The Graith.”

  “Who really? It was that Old Ambrosius.”

  “You weren’t even born back then. What do you know about it?”

  “I hear things. You would, too, Garol, if you bothered to listen.”

  “All I know is, I didn’t sign on to be a prison guard.”

  Krida groaned. “Shut up and roll.”

  Standing in the shadows, Morlock mimed tossing something. Deor would have preferred a clearer clue, but he nodded and gestured at his eyes. Morlock nodded and closed his eyes.

  Deor crouched and groped on the ground for a suitable rock. It took him a while to find one, but when he did he tapped Morlock on the elbow to let him know it was almost time to act, and then he threw the rock as hard as he could at the watch-thains’ coldlight.

  The glass shattered and the light went out. Deor saw the two goggling at each other in the glow of the dispersing lightwater.

  Morlock brushed by him, running up the alley in his soft shoes, his eyes still tightly closed. A man’s eyes would not adjust as quickly to darkness as Deor’s did, but the dwarf thought his harven-kin was overdoing the caution a bit. He followed him into the fray.

  There was a scramble under the wall of the lockhouse as the guard-thains tried to find their spears in the dark. They hadn’t yet thought to call for help, then Morlock and Deor were on them.

  Morlock seemed to be throttling Garol, which to Deor’s mind was a little extreme. The attack also wasn’t really an option for Deor, as Krida was an armlength or so taller than him.

  He set his feet and punched her as hard as he could in the stomach. But his aim was a little off and his stone-hard fist fell on her pubic bone. She bent over, gasping for air, and he hit her hard under the chin when it came into reach. She rolled unconscious on the street next to the dice and cup. Morlock lowered Garol there beside her—still breathing, Deor was glad to see, but quite unaware of the world.

  Morlock took a wedged digging tool from a pocket in his sleeve and Deor did the same. They went to work on the base of the wall.

  The first inch or so was painted stucco; after that they started getting into the dried fungus. Deor wondered whether they should cut breathing masks for themselves from their cloaks, but Morlock didn’t even seem to consider it, so he didn’t bother to make the suggestion. The nightmares were not physical; they were just trapped in the dried flesh of the fungus, like an old man’s soul in a dying body.

  The feeling of dread that he had dreaded came over Deor with startling suddenness. For a dwarf, digging is usually a happy occasion, but this was not like digging through honest dirt and rock. The outer layers of fungus were oddly crispy, like mummified human flesh. The core of the wall was harder, less layered, like ancient dried-out bone. Deor knew that he was lying there next to Morlock digging through a wall. But at the same time he felt that he was digging into a gigantic skull. Soon they would break through and confront the gigantic carnivorous maggots that had devoured the giant’s brain and were ravenous for new flesh.

  “You’re not my father and never were!” Morlock snarled, holding his digger like a knife. “My father is dead! His ashes rest in the Holy Halls under Thrymhaiam!”

  That startled Deor out of his skull nightmare. Morlock was having a nightmare about Merlin, of course. He knew his harven-kin often did.

  “I wish Oldfather Tyr was with us now,” he whispered to Morlock. “There was nothing that he feared.”

  Morlock shook his head—not like he was disagreeing; like a man waking. Then he whispered, “We must be close to the interior. The nightmares will be thickest there.”

  “Joy of joys.”

  They dug.

  The horror that Krida felt for mandrakes and dwarves was not hard for Deor to understand. He himself felt it for Other Folk at times, especially when they were dead. A
dwarf’s soul, he knew or believed, mounted into the sky and fled the world through the gateway in the west on the morning after its body’s death. But there was nothing in any teaching about the souls of men and women doing the same thing. They lingered, like mist, in the dark places of the earth; they haunted graveyards and possessed dead bodies.

  Deor knew where he and Morlock were and what they were doing, but at the same time he became convinced that they were digging into the mausoleum of a human graveyard. He had seen them, great buildings just like this but full of corpses rotting in boxes. And Other Folk went there and left flowers and had picnics and engaged in their bizarre and ugly mating practices on grass fed by the filth of rotting flesh. It was deeply disgusting. He hated those places and he couldn’t imagine why he had come to this one. Soon they would break through to the interior and it would be filled with bodies. But they would not be dead bodies. Not anymore. . . .

  His digger broke through into empty darkness. Not far away were staring eyes, gleaming silver in the moonlight.

  “Stand away,” Morlock directed, and Deor didn’t need to be told twice. When Deor was clear, Morlock swung around so that his feet were facing the pitted wall. He braced himself and kicked until the hole was big enough to crawl through.

  “Rope,” he said.

  Deor was a little surprised that Morlock was about to hang himself, but on reflection he decided that it was really the only escape. He handed Morlock the bight of rope hanging from his belt.

  Morlock drove his digger between two paving blocks and anchored the rope to it. Then he loosed the bight and, with the free end in hand, slithered feet first into the hole.

  Morlock saw eyes—dozens of them staring at him in the bar of moonslight falling after him into the cellar. He heard the hiss of many mouths breathing, smelt the stink of many bodies and their waste.

  “Kelat!”

  “That’s me!” said a voice just behind him. “You killed me and buried me once, but you won’t do it again!”

  Something sharp slashed the side of his neck. He leaped away but not before his blood fell burning to the ground.

  The moon-wounded darkness of the pit gave way to a blood-colored twilight as Morlock’s blood burned on the fungal floor. Kelat stood astonished in the dim, fiery light, watching burning blood drip off the sharp stake in his hand.

  If there was ever any chance of talking to Kelat through the haze of nightmares, it was obviously lost. Morlock kicked the stake out of Kelat’s hand and continued the kick to land with his full weight on the pit of Kelat’s stomach.

  Kelat oofed out the air in his lungs but was not so bemused that he didn’t get a grip on Morlock’s foot. He twisted it viciously. Morlock was compelled to spin with the twist, or limp through the rest of his life. He landed on his back in a pile of filth. Kelat charged him, shouting in a language Morlock didn’t know; he thought it might be Vraidish. He kicked Kelat in the knees and the stranger went down, striking his head against the cellar wall. He did not get up again.

  Morlock climbed to his feet and went over to check on Kelat. He was still breathing, thank God Sustainer. Morlock hefted up the twitching stranger, clearly in the grip of a nightmare, and stuffed him like a sack of beans up through the gap in the cellar wall. Deor began to help from the other side, and soon the way was clear for him to leave.

  He turned and looked at the Khnauronts. They were huddled up against the far wall, watching him in the dim light of the fire burning on the floor. He was tempted to let the fire burn—let them all die. They deserved it. But it wasn’t up to him to decide what they deserved. He stamped out the bloodfire and climbed up the rope through the gap into the free air of the alley.

  Deor was there, examining Kelat’s skull with his fingers as the stranger breathed stertorously and muttered gibberish or Vraidish.

  “He’ll live,” the dwarf said, banishing at least one of Morlock’s fears. “We weren’t exactly quiet.”

  “Let’s get away quickly.”

  “Sew you up first,” Deor said, taking an incombustible needle and thread from a couple of pockets.

  “You’ll burn your fingers,” Morlock said.

  “So what?” Deor said, and had him sit down in the street as he deftly sewed up Morlock’s wound (jagged, but not serious), then smeared it with a healing paste, then anointed his fingers with the same.

  “Thanks, harven.”

  “You’d do the same.”

  They went to pick up Kelat and started carrying him down the alleyway.

  Thains with long hooded spears began stepping out of the shadows.

  “Chaos in a wheelbarrow!” Deor cursed.

  They dropped Kelat in the street.

  Into the moonslit street strode a tall woman with white hair, wearing a red cloak.

  “Surrender, Guardians!” called out Noreê in undisguised triumph. “You will not take the prisoner away. But you will explain yourselves at Station tomorrow.”

  “You have no authority to stay us, Vocate,” Morlock called back.

  “I do have the power to do it, Vocate,” Noreê replied. “Stand away from the prisoner and you won’t be hurt.”

  “Approach the prisoner and you will be hurt,” Morlock replied. “What I say, I say to you all. I am on the Graith’s business and I will kill anyone who stands in my way. Maintain the Guard!”

  “Maintain the Guard!” replied several of the thains reflexively, but Noreê shouted over them, “Brave words, Guardian! But you can’t fight your way through my thains; there are too many of them.”

  “The odds were worse at the Hill of Storms,” Deor remarked. He unslung his axe and flourished it.

  Morlock drew both sword and spear. He and Deor stood back to back.

  “Thains, unhood your spears and advance,” Noreê directed. “Do not kill the dwarf if it can be helped.”

  Most of the thains shook the hoods off their bright spears and advanced slowly up the street. Glancing about, Morlock saw that there were thains cautiously advancing from the shadows on all sides of them. And there were others who stood indecisive behind them.

  “Khuknen vei vedorna,” Deor remarked in a low voice (“Their hearts aren’t in this”) and Morlock agreed, “Zhai!”

  Morlock had become fairly skilled at using a thain’s spear, and he thought that if he could take one away from the first unfortunate who approached him, their odds would go up. His stabbing spear was well-balanced for throwing, and that might take them off guard. If they could open up a hole in the wall of thains, it would be well to pick up Kelat and retreat into a narrow area between the houses, where their opponents’ numbers would matter even less. . . .

  Then there were other shadowy forms running into the street, hooded men coming through the gaps between the buildings, filling the empty moonslit streetstones between Morlock and Deor and the other Guardians. None of their faces could be seen, but each one wore a ring made of blackiron on his right hand.

  It was the Guild of Silent Men. Morlock lowered both his swords and waited on events.

  “Guardians, stand down!” said one of the Silent Men. “I am Teyn, Master of the Guild of Silent Men. I speak also for my colleague Seetch, now in the North.”

  “But you don’t speak for the Graith of Guardians,” Noreê said, as her thains hesitated. “This is an internal matter of the Graith, and I warn you to stay out of it.”

  “If it involves Ambrosius, it involves us. His blood is ours and ours is his.”

  Noreê stepped forward to look at Teyn’s face, still half hidden in his hood. She glanced over to Morlock as she said, “You must be mistaken. No member of the Graith may be associated with another order, or he is subject to penalty under the First Decree.”

  “He may not be associated with us, but we associate ourselves with him! I warn you, Guardian. You wield your power under our sufferance, the sufferance of the Guarded. The enemy of the Guarded is the enemy of the Wardlands. Do not make yourself our enemy. We will fight our enemies here as we fought t
hem in the North.”

  “I accept the limits on my power,” Noreê said slowly, as if she especially enjoyed saying the words, “and woe to those who do otherwise. Morlock! Do you insist on seizing the Graith’s prisoner with the help of these . . . gentlemen?”

  “I say what I have said: get out of my way. I am on the Graith’s business.”

  Noreê smiled like a shark and said, “Guardians, stand down. We will not go to war with the Guarded.”

  The thains lowered their spears and hooded them—many with visible relief. They filed away into the night.

  “Good luck on the Graith’s business!” Noreê called to Morlock before she, too, turned away. “The Graith will have some business with you when you return.”

  “What’s that about?” Deor asked, bewildered at Noreê’s sudden about face.

  Morlock thought he understood it. Noreê believed she could prove Impairment of the Guard against him. Certainly other vocate who had joined leagues with the Guarded against the Graith had been sent into exile. He thought of what Aloê had said and wondered if she was right.

  He grunted and shrugged.

  “Oh. Now I understand,” Deor said wryly. They reslung their weapons and went to talk to Teyn.

  “Morlock Ambrosius,” said Teyn, reaching out both hands. Morlock grasped them with both of his and said, “Teyn.” He wished that the Silent Men had not intervened, but it would be churlish not to recognize the generosity of their actions. The Guild had nothing to gain, and perhaps much to lose, by angering the Graith. But they had risked that for his sake.

  “Can we be of any more help?” Teyn asked anxiously. “We know the Silent Folk in the North fought hard at your side; we are willing to do the same.”

  There was an old rivalry, Morlock remembered, between Teyn and his colleague Seetch (long since married and moved to the colony of Silent Men and Women in the North). Perhaps there was some of that in tonight’s events.

  “There are a couple wounded thains behind the lockhouse, and a hole in the wall,” Morlock said. “You might see to them.”