by James Enge
“Yes: Deor wanted his body incinerated and the ashes decently buried. Dwarves are like that about people they care for. But Noreê and Morlock ignored us and started setting up the stasis spell. That was funny, too, because—” She didn’t finish.
“They hate each other,” Oluma finished. “That’s what people say, anyway.”
“Yes, but they agreed on this without even talking. Perhaps that’s the only way they could agree on anything.”
Aloê circled the body slowly, looking for details.
“I’ve never seen a body in stasis before,” admitted Oluma. “It’s amazing! You can still see the water droplets in his hair and on his skin! His clothes are heavy with it. His eyes are as clear as if he were still alive.”
It was remarkable, and that fact helped Aloê keep her patience. “What else do you see?” she asked.
“I would have expected more blood,” Denynê remarked. “But perhaps the stream washed it away.”
“Yes!” Oluma agreed. “The lips of the wound are—they are almost dry and . . . and crumbly.”
Aloê nodded in agreement. She had seen the same thing, but it was so odd she wanted to know that the others saw it, too.
“I’m going to counter-inscribe the spell,” she told her seconds. “Stand a few paces away, please.”
They stepped back into the ring of shadow surrounding the shining corpse. Aloê took a diamond-tipped stylus from her pocket and crouched down by one of the spell-anchors. She carefully inscribed an eversion rune on its outer face. She felt the emotional bite of the spell taking hold, but it was a thin whisper against the silent roar of the stasis spell. In the end, she had to inscribe variations on each of the anchors before the light faded and Earno’s face fell sideways, giving the wound in his throat an unpleasant likeness to a wry mouth.
She used a coldlight, a mirror, and a magnifying lens to examine the final image in the summoner’s dead eyes. It was, as she had feared, nothing useful—the sky, apparently, seen through a layer of water.
Aloê breathed through her mouth during most of this process because of the stench rising from the open wound.
“I think this stasis spell must have failed,” Oluma remarked, kneeling beside her and following her technique with interest.
“Hm?” Aloê murmured.
“That stink!” Oluma said cheerfully. She was not breathing through her mouth. “That’s from a body that’s been dead a few days.”
“I can’t see either Morlock Ambrosius or Noreê Darkslayer making such a mistake,” remarked Denynê dryly from well outside the stink zone.
“Not separately,” Oluma agreed. “But perhaps together? Maybe they were working at cross-purposes. Maybe that’s where the error crept in.”
“Possibly,” said Aloê, driven into speech, “but not probably. You must consider that Earno was murdered before his death—perhaps some days before.”
“Uh? Oh! I forgot about that part.”
Aloê would never forget about that part. She said next something that she knew she must but had dreaded since the moment she undertook this task: “Let’s look at that wound.”
“Yes!” cried Oluma, as if her best-beloved had asked her to dance at the festival of Harps.
“Gleh,” Aloê replied indistinctly.
She held the dead man’s head steady while Oluma probed the wound with a thin, faintly glowing scrutator and a polished speculum on a long stem. The edges of the wound were gray as a piece of moldy bread, and they were almost serrated in appearance.
“Never seen anything like it,” Oluma admitted. “Denynê, honey, could you have a look here?”
“Don’t call me that!” hissed the healer.
“Denynê?” Oluma asked, bewildered. “I thought—”
“Never mind!” Denynê hissed, and bent over the corpse. “Eeuuuccch.”
“You’re being disrespectful to the dead, dear.”
“He’ll never know it!” snapped the healer. “Hm. Hm. I’ve never seen anything like this either. Severed blood vessels the proximate cause of death, of course. The throat wound looks almost as if it were sutured, and the sutures were somehow removed, and the process of decay hastened. Oluma—”
“Sweetheart?”
“Shut. Up. With. That.”
“I’m only—”
“Only do this: put that scrutator next to the severed jugular.”
“Which one is the—?”
“Any of the big blood vessels that have been cut through. Please. If you don’t mind.”
Oluma shrugged and did as Denynê asked. “You see?” Denynê said to Aloê, genuinely excited. “The ends are frayed and somewhat grayish. What happened to the integument happened to them as well.”
“Excellent.” Aloê had drawn the same conclusion about the throat wound, but she hadn’t noticed the blood vessels. “There was never any suture, I think,” she added. “The force binding the wounds together was immaterial, a sealing spell not so very different from the stasis spell I just counter-inscribed.”
“What broke the seal?” asked Oluma. “Was it made to dispel after a certain stretch of time, or—”
“The stream!” said Denynê.
“Yes: that,” Aloê said. “Running water has a talic presence, almost like a living being. It can shatter certain types of spells. Earno was murdered some time before he died, several days’ travel up the Road, perhaps. Then the murderer put this seal upon their work and walked away, in the certain knowledge that Earno would come to grief before he reached A Thousand Towers.”
“Would such a spell require anchors, like the stasis spell?” asked Denynê.
“Yes.” Aloê traced her finger from one side of the wound up to the corpse’s jaw. “Do you see anything here?”
Denynê and Oluma both looked closely. Oluma tapped the blunt end of the scrutator several times and the light it shed increased markedly.
“The skin is very loose,” Oluma said. “Earno was a man of a certain age.”
“Loose . . . and fragile also,” Denynê said. “I see a line of disruption on the surface. It looked almost like an old scar for a second. But there is no scar—no gathering of tissue below the surface.”
“A stress mark from the spell, I think,” Aloê said. “There are others. We may find physical anchors at the end of the stresslines.”
“We will need to make incisions,” said Oluma with a certain satisfaction.
“Yes, but we will also need to follow the trail of the summoner back up the Road to find the scene of the actual murder. Are either of you gifted trackers?”
The healer and the gravedigger both looked a little blank in the scrutator’s pale light.
“Then,” Aloê said, “one of us should go back to ask for assistance from the Arbiter of the Peace.”
Oluma’s face was growing less bemused and more contented every moment. She would soon have the vocate to herself and have a chance to make up for previous missteps. So Aloê guessed, and she almost hated to say what she had to say next: “Oluma, you had better go.”
“Me?” cried the necrophor, startled. “Why me?”
“I expect you know the Arbiter better than Denynê does, and you certainly know her better than I do.”
“Er. Yes. There is that. I am a people person,” the gravedigger observed.
“Hurry back,” Aloê said.
Soon Oluma had mounted her steed and was clattering away in the night and Aloê and Denynê were undressing Earno’s dead body to cut him open.
“Oluma really would be better for this task, I think,” Denynê ventured to say, as she selected instruments from a rollup carrier.
“Possibly,” said Aloê. “But I don’t trust her.”
Denynê did not pretend to not understand what Aloê was talking about. “I think,” she said at last, “there is no malice in her. It is her sense of humor. I’m afraid. . . . Well, they tell me I don’t have one.”
“Nothing’s duller than someone who makes everything into a joke,” Aloê said. “Unless
they’re actually good at it. I don’t think Oluma is.”
“Well, it was probably best to send her after the Arbiter. She knows Ulvana far better than I do, and they seem to get along well.”
Ulvana. Ulvana. The name struck a chord in Aloê’s memory. “Is this the Honorable Ulvana Claystreet, from A Thousand Towers?” she asked.
Denynê thought long before answering. “I don’t know her surname,” she said at last, “and, of course, Arbiters have to forswear all other ranks and associations, much like your own order. But I think she did move here from A Thousand Towers. Did you know her there?”
Aloê was listening in her mind to another voice, screaming, Love! You unspeakable trull! Don’t you see how he hates you? The voice was her voice, and she was trying hard to remember the face of the woman she had screamed at more than a century ago. It might be the same face as the Arbiter here in Big Rock. It might be.
“Not really,” said Aloê at last. “But I think we did meet at least once, long ago.”
Denynê nodded without much interest and stuck a thin bright blade into Earno’s dead white face.
CHAPTER NINE
The Lacklands
Deor’s food ran out within a day and they were thrown back largely on the resources of Morlock’s travel rations. They travelled eastward through the foothills of the Whitethorns, a meandering path that kept them well away from inhabited lands. But they saw little that approached game, except a few scrawny goats that were more trouble than they were worth to catch. So Deor declared after several hours of trying to catch one, anyway.
Mushrooms, however, were relatively plentiful, and Deor delighted in each different patch of fungus that he found. Kelat ate none of it, and even Morlock was (to Deor’s mind) surprisingly choosy. But in general the world seemed ill-stocked with foodstuffs.
“There is some hunger everywhere, and all the time, these days,” Kelat said. “The sea yields better food than land lately, but that means that too many people fish the waters.”
“Things aren’t so bad in the Wardlands,” Deor said.
Kelat shrugged. “I hardly remember it. That . . . that stone was in my head. In the wide world, it is so bad, and worse every year.”
Kelat thought that the best chance of finding Rulgân Silverfoot was in Grarby, a town full of monsters on the northeast coast of the Sea of Stones, where Rulgân was worshipped as a god.
“I remember it,” Morlock said. “Is Danadhar still there?”
“The God-speaker?” Kelat was surprised and impressed.
“He wasn’t the God-speaker when I knew him,” Morlock said. “But that was long ago.”
“He has been God-speaker as long as anyone remembers,” Kelat said dubiously.
Morlock shrugged and said no more.
Eventually they had to leave the foothills and travel south.
“We must be careful as we cross the River Tilion,” Kelat said. “The Vraidish tribes are settled there, and their Great King is opposed to any dealing with dragons.” He rubbed the side of his head ruefully. “I understand that better now, I think.”
Morlock said nothing to that either.
No one lived in the Whitethorns or their shadow, but when they turned south they found themselves crossing land that had been cleared and levelled for farming, woods that had been thinned by axemen harvesting the wood for building and fuel, roads that had been worn in the land by the passage of people and their goods from town to town. They saw all the evidence of human habitation except for the humans.
They came at last in the evening to a town built up at a crossing of three little roads. There was a market in the center of town; there were fetish poles for the Old Gods of Ontil; there were houses that Deor guessed were hundreds of years old—a great age for a dwelling not made by a dwarf.
All the windows were dark; no smoke came from any chimney; no word or footstep other than their own could be heard in the whole place. The town was dead; even the animals were gone.
“What happened here?” Deor asked.
“The world is dying,” Kelat replied. “The people went south, I guess.”
Morlock said nothing, but found a decent-sized house with a fireplace. No one felt like using one of the empty beds, so they lay in their bedrolls on the floor by the fire. They didn’t bother foraging for food, but made a thin meal of the travel rations from Morlock’s pack. For once, Deor did not complain.
They rose early and left the sad, hollow town behind them. They saw more during that long day as they walked. Toward evening they stopped in another, this one on a fairly wide roadway running from west to east.
“I think this is the Old Ontilian road to Sarkunden,” Morlock said.
“I think it may be the big road to Sarkunden,” Kelat agreed. “I don’t know who made it.”
“It’s in very good repair.”
“Well, it hasn’t had much use lately, has it?” Deor snapped.
Morlock didn’t answer, but started rapping on the wooden wall of what seemed to have been a sauna.
“No one’s home, Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.
“The wood is sound,” Morlock said, “and probably sealed against water.”
“What are you talking about, harven?”
“This walking is tedious and slow. Let’s make a cart.”
“And where are the draft animals who will pull this cart?”
Morlock grunted. “You’ll figure it out,” he said eventually.
Morlock started pulling the sauna apart plank by plank while Deor and Kelat ransacked the town and the nearby farmhouses for tools. The oddly shaped cart was done well before midnight; the dwarf and the master maker could work as well by coldlight as by daylight. But Morlock worked through the night at the village smithy forging chains of cunningly joined links. When Deor and Kelat awoke before dawn, Morlock was fitting the last pieces into place.
“What is this ugly thing?” Deor demanded furiously.
“Pedal-powered cart,” Morlock said. “Gears and impulse-wells to magnify our efforts. Steering oar is in back, as you see.”
“And I’m supposed to plant my stony ass on one of those bare boards and pedal you across the unguarded lands, is that it?”
“Refashion the seat as it suits you. We can find padding around town. Two of us will pedal while the third one steers. We’ll go faster this way, if the roads don’t get much worse than this one.”
“And if they do?”
“We’ll carry, push, or abandon it.”
Deor deftly bound up their bedrolls over the wooden seats, examined the wheels, gears, and chains, muttering prayers or imprecations in Dwarvish, and finally climbed aboard. “I guess we should pedal and you steer at first? Until we all get the sense of the beast?”
Morlock nodded and they climbed aboard, piling their packs in the fourth seat. Kelat climbed aboard more hesitantly.
“Is this magic?” he asked. “I have had bad luck with magic.”
“Just a new way to get work done,” Deor assured him. “We’ll earn every mile we make in this thing.”
They put their feet to the pedals and got under way.
Their way was downhill, more often than not, but when the undulations of the land led the road upward, Morlock released some of the stored energy from the impulse wells and also changed the gear ratios. In spite of that, a couple of times they had to get out and push the contraption over the rise. Then they had the terrifying delight of the long, steep ride to the bottom of the hill, impulse collectors grinding against the wheels all the way down.
The vehicle had its advantages; even Deor was forced to admit it. The worst thing about it was the jolting. It was impossible even to get used to it, as the jolt changed depending on the road surface and the grade of incline. But they were going much faster than they had been, speeding past empty towns, gray lifeless fields, cold green woods.
Deor would have complained a thousand thousand times during the day, but he held his peace so as to not alarm Kelat. His only au
dible protest was when he innocently suggested that their vehicle be dubbed the Hippogriff.
They rode the grumbling Hippogriff in the day and slept hard at night, despite their thin rations. They talked as they travelled—Deor the most; Kelat very little; Morlock least of all.
They had grown so used to dead fields and empty towns that they were surprised one morning to see long tangling pillars of smoke arising from a nearby hill. The buildings there were clearly occupied, at least in the center of town. That center was surrounded by a wall, stitched together with mismatched lumber repurposed from demolished buildings, or so Deor’s practiced eye told him.
“Shall we risk it?” asked Deor, who was steering.
“No,” said Kelat.
“Yes,” said Morlock.
Deor agreed by steering the oar toward the hill and its town.
The guards at the gate were armored with bowl-like helmets and mattress-like padding. They were weaponed with ill-made wooden pikes, and something about their slouching stance and cheery grins made Deor think these were not professional soldiers—at least, not until recently. They watched the approach of the Hippogriff with open-mouthed surprise, not even coming to guard when Deor applied the impulse collectors and braked the cart in front of them.
“Greetings, sentinels!” said Deor in what he hoped was decent enough Ontilian.
“Heartheld thingings, strangers!” one of the guards said. “Have you been come to embrickle the highhearts of High Town?”
“No, we are passing through,” said Deor, his hopes of communication fading.
“Entrucklements for gift-and-get we have been bringing roadwise,” Kelat remarked, surprising Deor. But of course Kelat was from here, or near here.
The guards received his remark quite cheerfully, and seemed to welcome them in about twelve times as many syllables as Deor thought was really necessary.
As the guards were laboriously opening the gate to admit the Hippogriff, Kelat said, “I told them we were just passing through, but we might have things to trade. They seem excited by the offer.”
Morlock nodded and looked sour. Deor wondered why: perhaps it was just the torrent of warm stink that swept over them when the gate swung open.