The Wide World's End

by James Enge

“That’s true, but he is a completist and always hates to lose any member of a set. You will account for your absence, I hope. I am not surprised to see you in trouble, seeing the bad companions you fell among—”

  “Lady Regent!” called out the captain. “We found Prince Uthar, and—”

  “Shut up,” Ambrosia said. “Take that insignia off your shoulder. You are no longer a captain.”

  “But we—”

  “You interrupted me again. Dismount from your horse; you are no longer in the cavalry.”

  The former captain tore the hawk insignia from his shoulder and stood silently beside his horse.

  “What’s the fight about, Uthar Kelat?” she asked.

  “These men are graverobbers at least. They are carrying human flesh in their saddlebags.”

  “Salted, I think, madam,” Deor pointed out.

  “Does that make it worse or better?” she asked him curiously.

  “Worse, in my mind. They salted down fresh kills and stored them. That indicates long-term intent. But I don’t know your laws.”

  “My laws agree with your opinions. Gentlemen, what of it? Is Prince Uthar a liar?”

  They hung their heads without answering.

  “I sentence you to death,” said Ambrosia conversationally. “The reward for discovering Prince Uthar will be paid to your families. Put down your weapons and go to the stockade.”

  The soldiers looked at each other for a moment. Without another word, they dropped their weapons.

  “Hulmar, have a few of the gate guards go with them. They might need to carry a few of them. Then see about a decent burial of the bodies in their saddlebags. Incinerate them; we want no more graverobbing.”

  “Yes, Lady Ambrosia.”

  “Prince Uthar, report to Prince Uthar in Uthartown. Perhaps your friend Deor would be interested to accompany you. As for you, Vocate, perhaps you would join me for a brief conversation.”

  Morlock nodded and said, “Tyrfing.” The sword flew to his hand, scattering blood in its wake. He wiped the sword on the flap of a nearby tent and sheathed it.

  “Lady Regent,” Kelat said urgently, “I have news of some import, not only for the Kingdom of the Vraids but for the fate of the wide world.”

  “I’ll hear it in due time, Prince Uthar,” Ambrosia said patiently. “Meanwhile, welcome home. Morlock, to me, please.”

  Deor noticed with amusement that the Vraids were more alarmed when Ambrosia said her brother’s name than they had been by the flying swords or the other disasters that had befallen them.

  “Well, Prince Uthar!” Deor said, as the two Ambrosii turned away for their private confab. “It’s off to Uthartown for us. Will you introduce me to Prince Uthar when we see him?”

  “You think it’s funny,” said the discontented prince, “but it’s not funny.”

  “Oh, everything is funny, if you look at it in the wrong way. I’ll prove it to you.”

  And they argued the point all the way to Uthartown.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Scenes of the Crime

  Aloê and Denynê recovered seven force anchors from Earno’s jaw and chest. It was messy and difficult work, but there was a grim satisfaction in it. Now they stitched the body back together like an old shirt. It was a shirt nobody was ever going to use again, but Aloê was impressed by the care Denynê took in repairing the wounds their autopsy had made. Even when healing the dead, the shriveled orange-brown woman dropped no stitches, never said and never seemed to think, “Well, that’s good enough.” It was only good enough when it was perfect. Whether it was from pride in her work or respect for the dead, Aloê rather liked her for that.

  “So,” Denynê said, holding the toothlike anchors in her bloody hand, “the murderer put a wilderment on Earno, established the stasis, cut his throat, then sealed up the wounds with the stasis field itself. When Earno woke, he knew nothing of what had happened.”

  “At most, he would have thought it a nightmare,” Aloê said.

  “How could the murderer hope to act unobserved?” asked Denynê. “Did Earno not have companions on the road?”

  “At least one—perhaps two, depending on when the murder was committed,” Aloê said. “Perhaps the murderer also cast a wilderment on them. Or,” she added reluctantly, “perhaps they were part of a plot.”

  Denynê put the anchors carefully into separate jars and sealed them. “You don’t like to think that,” she observed eventually, when Aloê said no more.

  “No,” admitted Aloê. “The one companion is Deor syr Theorn, adoptive kin to my husband. The other is Noreê Darkslayer.”

  “Ah.”

  They went to wash their hands in the stream where Earno had died and sat in silence beside it for a while.

  Before they had occasion to say anything else to each other, they heard a rumble of wagon wheels and hoofbeats on the Road. It was the Arbiter of the Peace, Ulvana, with a pair of her servants. Aloê had expected Oluma to be with them, but she was not.

  “Fate on a dungfork,” swore Aloê quietly.

  Denynê looked at her, eyes wide with surprise.

  “Just when we could use a gravedigger,” Aloê said.

  Denynê shrugged, nodded.

  “Good night and greetings, Vocate,” Ulvana said formally. “I understand you can use my assistance.”

  You unspeakable trull! Don’t you see how he hates you?

  “Yes, Arbiter Ulvana; many thanks. I see my other second did not choose to return with you.”

  Ulvana shrugged. “She said she had some other business.”

  “A glut of corpses in town?” Aloê said acidly. “No—forget I said that, please. I’m always speaking before I think, Arbiter.”

  “It’s a common enough complaint,” said Ulvana coolly.

  “Can your servants help my other second to bring the body back into town? I’ll tend to the incineration myself later on if Oluma is disinclined.”

  “I can do it,” Denynê said, her orange-brown lips pale in the coldlights of the wagon.

  “No, thank you, Binder Denynê,” Aloê said. “Just tend to the body and keep it safe. At least one of his friends should be there when his body is given to the flames.”

  “I was his friend as well,” Ulvana said slowly, “and I would like to be present.”

  “There you have it, Denynê. Wait for our return, please. It may be a day or two, perhaps longer.”

  The body, dripping cold blood, was lifted gently into the back of the cart and wrapped there with a shroud of kyllen. Denynê and the Arbiter’s servants climbed aboard and drove the cart back down the Road. Aloê and Ulvana stood without speaking until they could no longer hear the cart or its horses, its lights merely a glimmer southward on the Road.

  “Do we have words to say to one another?” Aloê asked at last.

  Ulvana shook her head. Aloê shrugged, guessing that these words would be said in time, but not now. They mounted their horses (Ulvana taking the one that Denynê had left) and rode northward on the Road.

  It wasn’t long before they came to the first encampment. They dismounted and, without speaking, walked around the site. It was easy enough to find the perimeter: the Khnauronts had pissed and shitten where they lay in the night. Someone—Deor, Aloê suspected, from the neat uniformity of the digging—had buried most of the piles of dung, but there were feces smeared on the dry grass and the searing stench of urine all around the camp.

  Aloê felt that such a place was a scar on the face of the Wardlands, and she was grimly aware that there were others and worse ones now. The lockhouse in Fungustown must be particularly nightmarish. The land was changing with the world, and not for the better.

  But that was not her task to fix. She was here to look for blood, and there was none here. She didn’t need to lift into rapture to know that this was not the murder scene.

  “We may be on the Road for days,” she said to Ulvana at last. “Let’s turn in soon and go on in the morning.”

  “I have a tim
ber lodge near here,” Ulvana said diffidently.

  “Excellent,” said Aloê sincerely. She had a bedroll and some necessities with her, but she never enjoyed sleeping out of doors when she could avoid it.

  Ulvana took her horse by the reins and led it into the woods. Aloê followed with her own. They were deep in the thin harvested woods when they came into a moonslit clearing with a bark-covered lodge in its center.

  “Any of your people here?” asked Aloê.

  “Should not be,” Ulvana said. “We’ve cut as deeply as we should in these woods. In a few decades, perhaps we’ll return. But I come here sometimes to—well, get away from Big Rock.”

  Aloê nodded. They settled their horses with some food and water in the garth and then went into the lodge. Ulvana opened the lock by sticking a long ungainly key into it and turning it with her fingers. Aloê tried not to stare; the process seemed as old-fashioned as sailing ships, but she remembered that not everyone had the master of all makers keying their houses. There didn’t seem to be any protective spell on the lodge at all—not even fire-quell magic. That seemed an especially important omission when Aloê watched Ulvana kindle an open flame and use it to light a wick in a lamp filled with oil.

  The lodge had a number of beds scattered around its single room, a wood stove in the center, and some shelves laden with storage jars and bottles up against one wall. There was a pump and a sink against another wall, but no obvious door leading to a privy. Aloê guessed that she would soon be reflecting nostalgically on the comforts of Big Rock Inn.

  Ulvana rummaged around the shelves for food and drink and said, “I have a keg of cider and a few jars of wine. No beer, I’m afraid.”

  “I just drink water on a job like this,” Aloê said. “I’ll need to ascend into vision from time to time.” Drunkenness did not necessarily prevent rapture, but it did limit one’s control.

  She dumped her bag by a bed and walked over to the pump. There were some mugs and drinking cans there. She would have liked to wash one before drinking from it, wash it for a year and a day in bite-foam and boiling hot water, but she didn’t want to seem like a pampered princess. She blew the dust off a mug, pumped it full, drank, and then wordlessly offered what was left to Ulvana, who was watching expressionlessly from across the room. Ulvana came over and took the mug from her, drank what was left, and handed it back.

  “I’ll be having some wine, though,” she said, as she turned back to the shelves. “Rapture doesn’t suit me, I find.”

  That drink of water was some kind of turning point. Thereafter, Ulvana spoke to her about food, drink, sleeping arrangements, and other practicalities, as well as the task at hand. They ate fairly well: pickled cladroot and dried sleer meat, soaked in oil and fried, exchanging a word or two when needed.

  After Aloê had yawned a few times and they both agreed it was time to douse the light, Ulvana said, in the quiet conversational tone they’d been using, “I hated you for years, of course.”

  “What I said was unforgivable,” Aloê said. “I’ve always been ashamed of it.”

  “No,” Ulvana said. “No. I didn’t find that hard to forgive. You were right, of course, about him. He doesn’t really care about any woman—except perhaps you. And that was what I hated you for. My father’s family, you know, has a little money; they work in road repair and trash removal and that sort of thing. But they aren’t, you know, the thing. But Naevros, although he has very little money and no family—he is very much the thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought—if I were with him—that would sort of rub off. It seemed to for a while. Then it was gone and he was . . . well, he was rather cruel.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. That’s what I realized, and that’s why I stopped hating you. He probably feels like that about every woman he can have. He doesn’t feel like that about you because he can’t have you.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Or possibly not, of course. But that was my thinking. And then I thought: what if it had been different? What if I had fucked my way into, I don’t know—being the thing? It still wouldn’t be about me. I’d be nothing—just part of him, not anything in myself.”

  This struck close to Aloê’s fears about herself—that she was not Aloê Oaij anymore, but only Morlock’s wife. She said, “I understand.”

  “So I left. Came up here and worked in timber. Had my own crew after a while. I became an Arbiter a few years ago because we needed one and no one else wanted to do it.”

  “That’s the best reason.”

  “So they say. It’s been more good than bad. I don’t call myself ‘honorable’ or any of that fake stuff anymore. If people think I’m honorable, I won’t need it in my name. If they don’t, they won’t think it because I say it.”

  “Truth.”

  They were silent for a long while. Aloê repressed a yawn, understanding that Ulvana had something else to say.

  In the end she said, “I was angry that they sent you at first. I thought it was a deliberate insult. Now I see. . . . I’m glad it was you. You’re tired; we should sleep.”

  “I’m glad we’re in this together,” said Aloê, a little more warmly than she really felt. She felt some guilt about Ulvana, and that feeling had grown rather than diminished because of Ulvana’s forgiveness.

  She crawled into the bed closest to her bag, and it seemed as if Ulvana was going to say something again. But instead she just doused the light and got into another rack.

  Aloê wondered if she’d happened on Ulvana’s favorite bed and her hostess was going to ask her to switch. But that seemed unlikely: the bed was not terribly comfortable and not terribly clean. In fact it had an odd reek to it . . . an oily muskiness, mixed with something like sour milk.

  It smelt like a man, in fact—one of these greasy young things standing outside wineshops trying to impress each other and anyone impressionable who happened by.

  Ugh. Aloê almost climbed out of her own accord to try another bed. But for all she knew the next would be worse. And she was tired. She hoped her nose would go to sleep with the rest of her.

  Deep in the night, she dreamed someone was deep in her. She felt his weight on her, the oily slickness of his hairless chest sliding against her as he thrust himself into her, grunting the way men sometimes do, haloed with cheap musky scent. Her dream-eyes focused on his dream-face in the dream-shadows and she realized he was Naevros syr Tol. And from the glazed expression on his sweaty face he was coming inside her.

  Fuck, no! she wanted to say, and woke up as she was actually coughing out the words.

  “Excuse me?” asked Ulvana. Aloê opened bleary eyes to vaguely see Ulvana standing in a doorway filled with morning light.

  “Nightmare,” Aloê said thickly.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Absolutely not.” Aloê rolled out of bed, hawked, spat out of a convenient window, and set about her day with a deliberate fury. This was real and that was a dream—and a terrible dream, at that. Somehow the filthy scent in the bed and Ulvana’s evening talk about Naevros had mingled in her mind, and the little dreammaker who lived in the basement of her brain had sent that thing up to annoy her. That was all that it was. There was nothing else about it that was real. Nothing.

  They breakfasted on salted meat, pickled vegetables, and fresh mushrooms, all fried in oil. It was good, but afterward Aloê drank half her weight in water before she was free of the taste of salt in her mouth. After a minimum of ablutions, she moved with Ulvana toward the garth, where the horses were contentedly awaiting them. Ulvana had watered and fed them when she got up before dawn, and then went looking for mushrooms in the wood. A valuable companion, clearly: Aloê didn’t think she could have had better luck, and she told Ulvana so. It was interesting to watch Ulvana blush at the compliment: the embarrassed girl was still alive in there, inside the lumber merchant and Arbiter.

  They were travelling up the shining pale stones of the Road much f
aster than the captive Khnauronts had travelled down them. Before midday they came to another vile campsite. Aloê knew without sniffing around (which did not promise to be one of life’s great pleasures, anyway) that this was not the murder scene. They rode on without dismounting.

  In midafternoon they came to another of the old camps. Aloê felt the unpleasant sting of insight here. She dismounted and walked some distance from the campsite and the Road, ignoring Ulvana’s puzzled query. She lay down on a cold patch of grass and ascended into vision.

  It took a timeless time to find it, but she stayed aloft in the visionary state because she knew it was there—she could feel it. Burning with contaminated tal, some drops of blood lay on the ground, wrapped in a shadow of absence that felt like Earno.

  She descended to the world that women and men think of as real and lay there on the grass reflecting. The blood was Earno’s, shed in his sleep—enough to imprison the shape of his dream self there. And the taint in it. . . . It stank like the spell anchors that they had dug out of his body.

  There was not enough blood present for this to be the murder scene. But they were getting closer: Earno’s wound had still been fresh when he lay here.

  She stood up and walked back to Ulvana. “We ride on,” she said, and they did.

  Before nightfall they came to the place itself. Aloê knew before dismounting. They were just beyond the woods, and the tidy heaps of earth covering the Khnauronts’ dung stood out clearly against the dry green-gold grass of the plain. Sun and rain had washed away the stink of piss, thank God Avenger.

  Aloê dismounted without speaking and walked away from the scene. She sat cross-legged in a field, with her head in her hands, and left her body behind.

  The dry, empty field blazed with talic light in her vision: there was life everywhere: grass, bugs, worms, the long shimmering light of the living land itself, life everywhere.

  Except there.

  She drifted toward the clot of darkness in the shining web of light and life. It was another shadow of Earno, haloed here in poisoned blood.

  The talic aura of the blood trapped another shadow: Earno’s killer. The image was too distorted to be identifiable; it was a twisted shape overlain with many twisted shapes. The murderer had moved around Earno’s body as he or she killed him.