by James Enge
There was a sort of animal pen full of odd pink and brown beasts inside the wall. Attached to it was a building that was clearly, from its stench, a slaughterhouse. There were guards armed with pikes and scythes around the slaughterhouse and the pen.
Kelat made a sound of involuntary disgust, and Morlock’s bitter expression became, if possible, bitterer. Deor didn’t understand why at first, and then he realized that the animals were men. Men and boys, it seemed. Although Deor was not always sure whether Other Ilk were male and female, the absence of clothing helped here.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to his companions in Wardic. “These savages have nothing for us, nor we for them.”
“Not yet,” said Kelat reluctantly. “The Regent of the Great King will want to know about this. We . . . I should learn as much as I can.”
Morlock nodded grimly. They followed their guide, pedaling the Hippogriff up the winding narrow streets of High Town.
Well over half the townsfolk seemed to be female—perhaps as much as four-fifths, by Deor’s count. The women and girls were blank-faced, as if they were trying to remember something they had forgotten. None of them were armed. All the men were. None of the men seemed to be doing anything resembling physical work—fetching and carrying; cleaning; working. All the women were.
They came at last to a biggish house covered (recently) with silver paint, its front doors adorned with stained glass windows. The guard verbosely invited them to dismount and greet-and-be-greeted by the High Baron of High Town.
The High Baron of High Town was sitting on the floor of his entryway playing a game of checkers with an empty-faced young girl. He waved her away without speaking and stood to greet his visitors.
The High Baron of High Town wore splendid clothes that had clearly been made for someone else—probably several other people. His shining scarlet-and-gold tabard did not quite cover his belly; his skin showed through the lacing of his blue suede boots, and one of the seams was burst; his shining robe of office had gotten tangled with his feet, and his coronet had slipped down over his left ear. There were grease stains among the gold stitchings on his tabard.
“Bold baroner of High Town’s high barony,” began Kelat, “it is we who have been come to gift-and-give both things-of-word and things-of-things passing-wise from foothills coming to vale of Tilion going.”
The High Baron looked upon him contemplatively for a moment or two and then said, “Perhaps one of you other gentlemen . . . ?”
“Well,” said Deor with some relief, “he—” pointing at Morlock “—isn’t gentle, and I’m not a man. Still, maybe we can do some talking.”
“I certainly hope so. I certainly do. Some of our rustics have lost the clear path of Old Ontilian and have been become tangle-tugged in slang-sloughs lost.”
“Uh. I suppose so.”
“But I hope that you, gentle and man, are not considering immigrating into High Town? We have as many mouths as we can feed these days. Unless you have. . . . Perhaps somewhere safely hidden nearby . . . ? I think we understand each other.”
“No,” said Morlock.
“You have no females—no women or girls?”
“Not with us,” Deor said.
“We will treat them well. They will live through the year and the long winter to follow, and how many people can say that in these dark cold days? The price will be as nothing, to men as devoted as yourselves.”
“You waste your time,” Morlock said.
“I have more time than anyone! It is a luxury I enjoy wasting. All this was my idea, so they made me High Baron, when I was only the village usurer down in Low Town a few years ago. We will accept females here in High Town, one for every two males who surrender themselves to our food pens. The women do work and have other uses; the men go to feed the community. It is the only way we survived so long as other towns faded into the dust.”
“No,” said Kelat.
The High Baron chuckled. “Well, I thought not. No one would carry a woman while travelling. But we will accept you as immigrants of the usual sort—straight into the slaughterhouse.”
Armed men stepped out of the shadows of the hall. They wore shirts of overlapping bronze plates and carried curved swords and were not at all like the jolly cannibals at the gate.
Morlock said, in a conversational tone, “Tyrfing.”
The black-and-white crystalline blade burst through the stained glass in the doors and flew to Morlock’s right hand.
The High Baron goggled at the sword and the armsmen did the same. Morlock seized the High Baron by the loose skin in his fat neck and held the black-and-white blade to the Baron’s throat.
“We’re leaving,” Deor said. “Don’t try to stop us, or you’ll need a new baron.”
The armsmen didn’t look heartbroken at this thought, but didn’t try to stop them either. They backed out the door, Morlock dragging the sputtering baron along for the ride. He sheathed Tyrfing in the scabbard on his pack and sat down in the back bench, making the baron stand in front of him.
Kelat and Deor piled onto the front bench and began to pedal. Morlock steered them skillfully in a tight circle and they rattled down the same narrow street they had ridden up.
“Halt at the gate!” Kelat shouted back.
“Risky,” Morlock said.
“We have to try!” Kelat insisted. He didn’t say what he wanted to try; Deor thought he could guess and Morlock at least didn’t ask. But he did grind the wheels to a halt just before the still open gate.
Kelat leaped out of the car. Morlock tossed him his stabbing spear and followed, carrying Tyrfing and dragging the High Baron with him. Deor grabbed his axe and stood between the gate guards and Hippogriff.
With the advantages of surprise, rage, and skill, Kelat easily slew two of the cage guards, and Morlock struck the third senseless with the flat of Tyrfing.
Kelat attacked the thin fence with the spearblade, slashing two-handed until a great hole was opened, and the naked men within peered incuriously out.
“Come with me!” shouted Kelat. “Some, at least, can escape! We will return with the Vraidish army at our backs and cleave High Town until it is neither high nor a town.”
None of the men or boys within moved to escape.
“Come with me!” shouted Kelat. “What have you got to lose?”
“Everyone must die,” said one. “This way, at least, my dear one is safe.”
“The world is dying,” said another. “Break a hole in that and I’ll crawl out.”
“Morlock!” shouted Deor. There were armed men coming down the hill.
“They chose this,” Morlock said to Kelat. “We must go.”
Weeping, Kelat turned away and threw himself into the Hippogriff, the spear clattering on the floorboards by the pedals. Deor joined him, and Morlock resumed the steering oar, dragging the Baron along as before. He released impulse energy from the wells and the Hippogriff leapt through the gate and down the hill and away into the Lacklands.
They had gone some miles and High Town had sunk beneath a ridge behind them when Morlock braked the Hippogriff to a halt.
“You’re going to kill me, now,” said the High Baron sulkily. “But all I did was what was best for my town. How many of them would be alive now if I hadn’t led the way? In times like these, not everyone can live. Choices must be made. Don’t blame me for the illness of the world.”
“Get out,” said Morlock, letting go of the baronial neck.
The Baron stumbled onto the grass-grown road. He turned around as if he expected to be stabbed in the back, but Morlock made no move to follow him.
“Go back to High Town, if you like,” the crooked man said. “I suspect someone else is baron there now, and you will be welcomed as merely an immigrant.”
He released the brake and Deor and Kelat pedaled furiously. They left the Baron standing in a cloud of dust. Deor glanced back and saw that the Baron was moving . . . but leaving the road to walk south, not returning to High
Town.
Kelat laughed fiercely when he looked back and saw the same. His tears had dried, leaving filthy trails on his face. But after he laughed his look of grief and loss returned and long remained. He did not talk for the rest of that day.
“Things like that should not be,” he said to Morlock that night, when they halted in the open country, many miles from High Town.
“What would you do to stop them?” Morlock asked.
Kelat did not answer.
The road was smoother now; many stretches were free entirely from grass, and they travelled swiftly. Three days after leaving High Town, they came over a rise and saw the silver thread of the Tilion in the distance. Far to the south, along the edge of the horizon, was a blue haze that might have been the sea.
“We must be careful there,” Kelat said, pointing. “The bridge over the Tilion may be kept by Vraidish soldiers.
Morlock shrugged indifferently.
But the Vraids caught up with them long before they reached the Tilion. One of the towns along their way down to the river was not quite empty: there was a small squad of Vraidish horsemen there. They started shouting and pointing when they saw the Hippogriff on its wheeled flight, and Kelat wanted to pedal on as fast as they could, but Morlock (who was steering again) put the impulse collectors on full and the wheels ground to a halt.
The squad leader reined his horse in beside the Hippogriff and stared at it and all its occupants.
“Good day, sir!” said Deor in passable Vraidish. “Can we help you with anything?”
The horse soldier didn’t answer him. He looked long at Kelat and then said, “Prince Uthar. You have been long missed.”
“Don’t call me that!” Kelat said.
“It is your right, and my duty, Prince Uthar,” the soldier said.
“Is your name really Uthar?” asked Deor coolly. He didn’t care for people who went by false names.
“It is!” the soldier said, slapping the shaft of his spear against his left hand, as if that made the statement truer.
“Every son of Lathmar the Old, Great King of the Vraids, is named Uthar,” said the man they knew as Kelat.
“Oh,” said Deor, taken aback. “That must be confusing. How many of you are there?”
“Three hundred and fifty and two.”
“I mean: how many sons of Lathmar the Old?” Deor clarified, assuming that he had been misunderstood.
“Three hundred and fifty and two,” Kelat repeated. “He’s a hundred and thirty years old; he’s had dozens of wives and a hundred concubines.”
Deor almost said Ugh, for they ran things differently under Thrymhaiam, but then remembered that would be rude. So he said, “Um.”
“The next Great King must, of course, be named Uthar,” the horse soldier said. “Uthar and Lathmar have been the names of our kings since the gods fashioned the universe out of the mud of time.”
Kelat muttered under his breath.
“Prince Uthar?” asked the soldier, politely but dangerously. The others in the troop had by now surrounded the Hippogriff and were looking at the occupants with cold, unfriendly eyes.
“We need use-names to be our own, since nothing else is,” Kelat said, addressing Deor and Morlock rather than the soldiers. “I didn’t lie to you. But there were truths I didn’t tell. I’m sorry.”
Morlock put his hand on Kelat’s shoulder. Kelat nodded and Morlock removed his hand.
Deor was fascinated to observe that some sort of communication had occurred, and he was about to ask what they had said, but he was forestalled by the mounted captain.
“Prince Uthar, there is a reward for your recovery. I beg you will get out of that—that—”
“It’s the Hippogriff,” Deor said. He had his own unspoken criticisms of the wheeled beast, but he didn’t like anyone else sneering at it.
“—that Hippogriff and come with us to see the Regent.”
Kelat or Uthar or whoever he was said, “I have urgent business in the Lacklands and may not come.”
“Prince Uthar, you understand that I ask you only for politeness’ sake. The reward is food that will feed our families for a month. You will come with us.”
“Where is the Regent of the Vraids?” asked Morlock.
The mounted captain said nothing until Kelat said, “Answer him.”
“The Regent is overseeing the diggings north of Ontil.”
“Man after my own heart,” Deor said. Kelat looked at him with incomprehension, but it was not to be expected that a man would understand how much a dwarf loves the simple joy of moving soil and stone from one place to another.
“Is there a fair road to the diggings?” asked Morlock.
At first the captain didn’t answer, but a glare from Kelat prompted him to reluctantly reply, “As fair as this.”
“Let’s go with them to your father’s Regent,” Morlock suggested. “It’s on our way.”
“But will we be allowed to continue on our way?” Kelat said.
Morlock laughed—an ugly sound to Deor’s ear, and also to the Vraidish horsemen from the sour expressions on their faces.
And so from there they rode on with an escort. It perhaps lent dignity to their passage in the eyes of a watcher, if there were any. But Deor found it very disgusting. He was not terribly fond of horses in the first place, and the clouds of dust they raised on the dry road made it hard to breathe. Then there was their regrettable habit of farting, or blasting dung out their rear ends, bespattering the road and Hippogriff’s wheels. At least they mostly liked to piss while at rest off the side of the road, like their riders.
But it was the riders that really disgusted Deor. They sang songs (or at least shouted lyrics); they shouted jokes to each other; they complained about their gear and the army’s command; they farted nearly as often and as poisonously as their horses.
All of that could have been borne. But Deor noticed something actually intolerable: shriveled fingers of a human hand sticking out of one of their saddlebags. After he saw that, he paid close attention to their baggage, and he became sure it was all stuffed with human meat.
“Is everyone in the Lacklands a cannibal?” he asked Kelat.
The young man shook his head but did not otherwise answer. But Deor was sure that Kelat had noticed the same thing. As for Morlock, he noticed most things, except the difference between decent food and mere fuel for a bellyfire.
The long slope down to the Tilion was in their favor and they made excellent progress, often leaving their horsebound captors/guards behind to chew on the Hippogriff’s dust.
At last they came to a paved roadway, and a city of tents and soldiers, not far from the river. At the horse soldiers’ direction, they halted the Hippogriff at the edge of the camp and got out of it.
“Leave your things here,” the captain directed.
Morlock and Deor ignored him and shouldered their packs along with their weapons.
“Your things will be safe here,” the captain said.
“Will your things be safe here?” Deor demanded. “Why don’t you unburden yourselves and your steeds?”
The horse soldiers eyed each other uneasily.
A tall, gray-bearded man strode up, gold sheaths on his arms and legs. “What’s this noise?” he demanded. “His Majesty the Great King is taking his evening nap!”
“We discovered Prince Uthar, the one that was lost, sir,” the captain said. “We claim the reward.”
The older man looked with bemusement at the Hippogriff and her crew. Then he recognized Kelat. “Prince Uthar! We had given up hope for you! The Regent will have many questions.”
“Ask a question of these men,” Kelat said flatly. “Ask why they were roving in the Lacklands. Ask why their saddlebags are stuffed with human flesh.”
“Eh?” the graybeard said. He turned to the horse soldiers. “Gentlemen, dismount.”
The gentlemen did not dismount, but unsheathed their long, curved swords.
Kelat seized the stabbing spe
ar from the floorboards of the Hippogriff. Deor shrugged off his pack, grabbed his axe, and followed Kelat into the fight. From the corner of his eye he was unsurprised to see Morlock with Tyrfing in his right hand and a cool killing look in his ice-colored eyes as he charged the horsemen.
The horse soldiers were in a bad way. They could not back their horses up, for the paling was behind them. Turning right would take them into the tangle of tents and booths; to their left was the gate and the ditch. To ride forward they would have to trample Prince Uthar/Kelat and graybeard and probably earn a few demerits or something.
In the end, that was what they chose to do, but it was already too late. Morlock dragged one man out of the saddle and threw his sword through another, who fell screaming into the mud. Kelat was facing down a cluster of soldiers to Deor’s left. Ahead of him a horse reared and a horseman brandished a blade. Deor parried the blade with his axe and punched the horse in the chest with all his strength. It gave a kind of squeal and fell back onto the horse behind him.
“Khai tyrkhodhen!” he shouted exultantly. “Ath Thrymhaimen! Ath! Ath!” And he waded forward to strike again.
“Khuf!” shouted a voice that intended to be obeyed. “And all of you: put away your weapons.”
The nascent battle died instantly. “Now you’ve done it!” one of the soldiers muttered to the captain. “It’s the Regent!”
The Regent strode down the street of tents, her goldworked black cloak furling behind her, a gold coronet on her dark-red tangled hair, intelligence and anger mingling in her ice-colored eyes.
“My Lady Regent,” Graybeard said, “these soldiers brought Prince Uthar back, but—”
Ambrosia Viviana held up a long-fingered hand and Graybeard fell silent. “No blame to you, Lord Hulmar. I think I see the seeds of this discord.”
“Good evening, madam,” said Deor.
“Good evening to you, Deortheorn, and to your silent friend, there. Prince Uthar—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Prince Uthar, you have long been missed. Your father was much concerned.”
“He doesn’t even know who I am! If he were passing by you’d have to point me out to him!”