by James Enge
“Except your own conscience, Veluê.”
“Anyone else’s at all,” Noreê said urgently, as if she considered talk of conscience frivolous.
Veluê’s dark eyes went from Aloê to Noreê and back again. “I will do so, Vocates.”
“Thanks,” Aloê said. “Show me this sock that’s been tampered with.”
Veluê led the way to a scrinium with several message socks in pigeonholes. “This is the one,” she said, pointing.
“Did you discover it?”
“No, to my shame. That was the day man—Curruth is his name.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Chaos eat his bones.”
The other two Guardians looked at her in surprise.
“And mine, too. Earno’s message sock was stolen, Noreê.”
“Oh. Indeed.”
“Indeed. And I sat in this room some days ago and sent a message to the necrophors, never thinking there might be evidence about his murder in this room.”
“There still might be,” Noreê said thoughtfully.
“How so?” Aloê asked. “The sigil is broken. The palimpsest within is gone.”
“But message socks work because the two enclosures, and the palimpsests within them, are bound in talic stranj. There might be a talic impression in the message sock of the hand that removed the scrip and broke the sigil, disrupting the stranj.”
“We couldn’t run around reading the palms of everyone in the world . . . but we could start with those who likely had access.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
“The impression, if there is one, will only be readable once; perceiving the talic pattern will disrupt it. Should I look for it, or should you?”
Aloê thought for a moment. “It’d be best if we look together, wouldn’t you say? It doubles our chances of finding this fellow. Unless there’s some reason we can’t join perceptions for this purpose.”
Noreê’s wintry face was briefly warmed by a smile. “No, you’re right. That would be best.”
Noreê was the greatest seer in the world, with the possible exception of Bleys, a couple of deranged recluses in New Moorhope, Ambrosia Viviana . . . and perhaps some of the mind-sculptors in the Anhikh Kômos. Aloê never ventured on an act of the Sight in her presence without some qualms of embarrassment. But she had more important things to think about now than her ego: she braced her feet so that her body could stand in semi-consciousness and let her mind ascend the invisible steps to visionary rapture.
The eye of her mind opened and she found her talic self standing apart from the slumbrous glow of her body. Near to her in intention was Noreê, whose talic self was like a river of icy light. Aloê extended her coppery selfhood to mingle with that of the older, wiser, crueller woman. The shock of joining was deep: Aloê was used to sharing it with Thea, but Thea was gone. . . . Never mind. Never mind. They were joined.
They moved in united intention toward the violated message sock. The sigil had a spidery multibranched mark on it—the shock of spellbreak. The sock itself. . . .
She/they thought they/she saw some words! Earno’s last message. They/she impressed the forms, but did not read them. Nothing is so hostile to the rapture of vision as language.
Within the sock . . . not a talic impression, but the reverse of one . . . not the image but its impress in the receptive matter of the enclosure. The sense of a specific person’s absence. She/they did not recognize it. But they/she took the impress of that also.
“Return,” said Noreê with her mouth, as if she were not in rapture at all. Aloê hardly heard it through her distant ears; she felt it directly in her selfhood. Which was hers alone again: Noreê had disentangled herself and descended from rapture already.
It took longer for Aloê, a timeless time. But at last or instantly the eye of her mind closed and the eyes of her body opened: she stood alongside Noreê in the hall of messages.
“It was a letter to Morlock,” Aloê said thoughtfully. “Oh, Chaos on crutches. That’s no good.”
“Is it not?” asked Noreê thoughtfully. “I remember something about ‘make you king’ and ‘consider Lernaion an enemy.’”
“After the Battle of Tunglskin, Lernaion said to Earno, ‘They will make that crooked man king,’ or something like that. Earno must have decided to warn Morlock about it. This doesn’t tell us anything that I didn’t already know.”
“I didn’t know it,” Noreê said. “And it may help us more than you think. Do you bear an impress of the thief?”
“Yes.” Aloê closed her eyes: the sensation was still clear in her mind. “More of an un-press—a sense of what the thief exactly is not. I’m not putting it well.”
“It can’t be put well.”
Aloê opened her eyes to see that Noreê was smiling at her again. “Tell me something, Vocate.”
“Yes?”
“You discovered this some time ago. Why did you wait to read the imprint in the message sock?”
Noreê said, “Why do you suppose?”
“I suppose that you thought I was the thief, and you wanted to test that suspicion before you revealed your knowledge.”
“Your shot strikes close, but not exactly in the center ring. I feared you might be the thief, and waited until I was sure you were not. You were a good choice for vengeancer, Aloê—none better. But I didn’t trust the man who proposed you. I had to be sure.”
“And now you are.”
“Yes. And you of me, I hope.”
“Within limits. I still think you’re crazy on the subject of the Ambrosii.”
Noreê shrugged uneasily. “It may be so. Intuition guides me very strongly. But to surrender to intuition is also to surrender to prejudice and other impulses that arise from the dark places of the mind. Everything has its cost. But I see what I see. It should not matter for this purpose, though: I can’t believe that Morlock would murder Earno and leave you to investigate the crime . . . unless you were somehow implicated. As you are not, plainly.”
Aloê yawned. “Beg your pardon. A long day for me. Noreê, will you meet with me tomorrow morning and help find the thief? If he was not the murderer, he must have been acting at their behest.”
“Surely.” Noreê put a gentle hand on Aloê’s shoulder. (The same hand had broken the neck of Osros, Third of the Dark Seven of Kaen.) “Rest, child. I’ll come see you in the morning.”
They walked out, exchanging a few more words as they stood in front of the Chamber. Then Noreê went her way and Aloê walked back to fetch her horse from the stable near the refectory where she had left it.
Full night had fallen, and a chilly night for spring. Horseman and Trumpeter were down and Chariot glowed somber in the eastern sky. The stars above were as sharp as silver knives; so was the wind off the river. She took part of her cloak and covered her head with it.
A single musical tone sounded, not far off in the night. She wondered for a startled moment why such a sound would make her afraid. Then the blade of a gravebolt entered her neck.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The God and His Enemies
“Are you enemies of the God?” the Gray Folk asked, their red eyes twitching with anger.
Deor waited for Morlock to say something, but he was sort of twitching himself. So the dwarf got up and said, “Ruthenen! I am Deor syr Theorn, Thain to the Graith of Guardians and cousin to the Eldest of the Seven Clans under Thrymhaiam. I greet you.”
“We do not ask who you are, we ask: who are you? Are you enemies of the God, or not?”
Either the truth or a lie seemed equally likely to get them killed. Deor decided he would rather be killed for the truth. “We are not enemies of your God, but neither are we friends. He’s no god of ours.”
“It is enough,” the leader decided. “Excantors, disarm them and keep them safe.”
“Let it happen,” Ambrosia suggested in Wardic, and Deor nodded. Kelat seemed inclined to follow Ambrosia’s le
ad, no matter what the situation and Morlock—there was something wrong with him. He was in no state to be making decisions.
Some of the Gray Folk picked up their packs and weapons; the others surrounded them.
“Begin!” said the leader.
The excantors sang. It was a harsh, deep music, but not unharmonious. If there were words in it, they were in a language Deor did not know. The excantors began to march, and the four companions perforce marched with them—south and east, into the burning heart of Grarby.
They came to a jail. It was crowded with Gray Folk who jeered as the excantors chanted their way down the narrow stone hallway. There was a cell at the end; it was occupied by Gray Folk in kilts. These were hustled out of the cell and stuffed one at a time into other already-overcrowded cells.
“We must leave you here,” the leader of the excantors said apologetically to Deor, “but we will return with food and other comforts. May the God not be with you.”
“Uh,” said Deor, driven to Morlockian levels of terseness by confusion. Were they guests or prisoners? What were the Gray Folk fighting about?
He put these questions to Kelat, but the young Vraid was as bemused as he was. “It was not like this when I was here before. The town was very quiet. I never saw a fight, much less a war.”
Morlock was sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees, his luminous gray eyes fixed on something that was not present. Deor sat down beside him and said, “Morlock. . . .”
“It was so hungry,” Morlock said. “So hungry. In so much pain. It could never eat enough to dull the pain. The pain frightened it. The dark frightened it. It was meant to have eyes but didn’t any longer. It didn’t notice the cold but it was always cold. I noticed. I noticed the cold. Then it died and it didn’t want to die. But it died and died, and it keeps on dying.”
“That damn sword,” Ambrosia said. “He told me something about it. It’s dangerous to kill with the thing.”
“If—” Kelat began.
“Shut up. Deor, let him be for a while. If need be, I’ll go into rapport with him and try to bring him out of it. But the fact that he’s talking is actually a pretty good sign, as these things go.”
There was a key rattling in the lock of the cell. Ambrosia, Kelat, and Deor turned toward the door as it opened; Morlock didn’t seem to notice.
The leader of the excantors was there. He spoke to Ambrosia, “Lady, are you Ambrosia Viviana?”
“I am.”
“The Olvinar would like to speak with you.”
“Hypage opisô mou,” hissed Morlock.
Deor thought he was muttering gibberish, but Ambrosia looked startled, then laughed. “I’ll be careful, ruthen. Look after the children for me.”
She left the cell with the excantor, who locked the door and silently led her away.
Halfway up the long hall, Ambrosia said, “Why aren’t you chanting, if you don’t mind me asking?”
The mandrake shrugged scaly shoulders as crooked as her own and said, “It agitates the godstruck. And . . . I don’t think it really does any good.”
“Oh. What good is it supposed to do?”
“Keep God out of your head.”
“Is he often, um, in there?”
“Wouldn’t be much of a god if he wasn’t, would he?”
“I couldn’t say. Which god is he again?”
“There’s only one God!” said the excantor reflexively. “And he, uh, doesn’t exist,” he added lamely.
Theology was never a strong subject with Ambrosia, so she didn’t inquire further along these lines. There were more immediate questions, like: “Who is this Olvinar, then? I take it he exists.”
“Of course he exists. He would like to speak with you.”
“Well, then.”
The mandrake looked askance at her with blood-red eyes and then said grudgingly, “I must seem to you to be gibbering.”
“No,” said Ambrosia, lying with practiced ease. “But,” she added, because the best lies serve as gilt for the truth, “I don’t really understand what is happening here.”
“I will tell you the tale as I understand it while we walk.”
“It would be a kindness, ruthen.”
He looked at her again, more directly this time, and said. “Then. In the old time, there was one of us, we know not his name, he defied the calling of his blood and did not become a dragon. He learned of the Little Cousins under Thrymhaiam and the Blackthorns, and he thought he would create a religion to teach the Gray Folk to fight their blood—to not surrender to the evil within them. He was our lawgiver, our temple builder. But the temple was empty, for who—what god would be the perfect being who would inspire us to be perfect?
“Then the God actually appeared?”
“He appeared, and he was evil in our eyes and stank in our snouts. Many were lost to the dragon plague then. But a new teacher arose. He taught that this was an avatar of the God, sent to show us how not to be, how not to live. His imperfection was our guide to perfection.”
“Hm.”
“Well, it stopped the plague. We could live, together, as ourselves, and that was something.”
“And then . . . ?”
“And then came the Olvinar, the Adversary, the one called Lightbringer. He came to free us. He taught us that if we managed to kill the God, we would truly be free. It was a great word, and many received it gladly.”
“But not all.”
“No. Many still cling to the old foolish ways. And so we are at war with ourselves. The city burns, and we cannot cooperate to put out the fire. And the sun is dying, and some say it is because of the war against the God.”
Ambrosia put her hand on the excantor’s gray-plated forearm and said, “If I tried to escape, you wouldn’t try very hard to stop me, would you?”
“I would not try at all,” the mandrake said candidly. “I am . . . sick of it. Sick of all this.” After a pause he whispered, “When the Adversary . . . when he sends us out to fight our ruthen kin . . . I enjoy it too much. Sometimes I . . . feel a cold thirst in my throat that I would quench with hot blood. I dream blasphemous dreams of chewing the sacred flesh of my kin . . . breaking their bones . . . licking out the burning marrow with a long forked tongue. I can’t. . . . This can’t go on forever. It has gone on too long. Perhaps the world really must end. Perhaps I would welcome it.”
“Well, I’ll go with you and talk to the Olvinar, this anti-God. Perhaps we can sort out a less permanent solution for this mess.”
He nodded, clamped his long jaws hungrily a few times, and did not speak.
The Adversary lived in a house on the north side of town. It looked like a coil of great cable, wrapped around and around several storeys high, with a protrusion like a tower at the top.
There were two excantors chanting quietly at the front door. They held up their swords to salute their senior, then opened the door and stood aside.
“Go in, if you will,” her companion said. “He would like to speak to you alone.”
Ambrosia entered the dark doorway and heard the door closed and locked behind her. Protecting the Adversary? Imprisoning him?
The ground floor of the house was one big room interrupted by support columns. The stairway to the upper floors was exposed against the far wall.
The room was lit only in the center, where a white light-globe floated in midair. Beneath it, an old man sat at a table piled with books, light gleaming on his white hair and beard as he pored over a curious volume bound in brass.
The Adversary raised his head and looked at her with luminous blue eyes.
“Good evening, father,” said Ambrosia.
“Ah! Ambrosia my dear, my very dear!” Merlin Ambrosius leapt up and ran over to greet his favorite daughter.
“Ὓπαγε ὀπίσω μου, Σατανᾶ!” she said, holding out both her hands to reject his embrace. Get behind me, Adversary! it meant in one of the unspoken languages from her mother’s world.
“Wha
t . . . ? Ah! Ah hahahaha!” He laughed for some time rather theatrically and then said, “Very good, my dear. A most amusing reference to that somewhat obscure literary classic. That’s one reason I enjoy talking to you, my dear: your suppleness of mind. Your brother would be sadly incapable of appreciating such a jest, even if he were well-read enough to make it.”
Ambrosia forbore to point out that she was not joking and that Morlock had quoted that very text to her less than an hour before. She said instead, “Why are you here, father? I take it you are the great Adversary of the local god.”
“Yes, yes, they flatter me with that noble title. You know the secret name of this god, perhaps?”
“Morlock says he is Rulgân Silverfoot, also called the Kinslayer.”
“Yes, indeed—although what point there is in calling a dragon ‘kinslayer’ is beyond my telling. It’s like saying, ‘the one with wings—you know, the one who breathes fire.’”
“Hm.”
“But, more to the point, what brings you here, my dear? I gather you didn’t expect to find me here.”
“Not until I saw that vile fish you made.”
“Oh! Oh. You spotted that as one of mine, did you? How?”
“The thing was vicious, ugly, and a patchwork of scars. The maker makes in his own image.”
“Oh, come now. I have very few scars.”
“It was also in dreadful pain. So Morlock says.”
“The pain of a fish. These are the trivia that your brother concerns himself with, my dear.”
“He was concerned with saving me and my companions.”
“Oh! Your companions, yes, I admit, I have little interest in them. But my emissary would not have killed you. Your blood would have poisoned him, among other things. No, I wanted you to come here, and here you are.”
“But you can’t have expected me. You came here originally for some other reason.”
“And so did you, but you haven’t told me either, you know. We can dance around and around the point and never come to it.”
“We think Rulgân knows something about these entities that are killing the sun.”
Merlin’s eyebrows rose in polite surprise. “Only that? Really?”