The Wide World's End

by James Enge

  “What was that name?” Kelat asked.

  “Danadhar. It’s someone he met the last time he was through here.”

  “The god-speaker.”

  “As I understand it, someone else was god-speaker back then. But I don’t doubt that this Danadhar is god-speaker now: from Morlock’s account, he was very religious. But that’s right: you were around here last year, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t see this.”

  “Understandable. In one brief stay one can never really see all the things worth seeing in a place. For instance, I spent a goodly amount of time in A Thousand Towers over the part century, but I never had occasion to see the Museum of Lithicated Teratomata or the Treasure-House of Forgotten Elbow-Guards.”

  “I don’t mean the jail,” Kelat explained patiently. “I was in a cell for a while last year—not this one—while they figured out what to do with me. I mean this.” Kelat pointed at something on the wall.

  It was some kind of memorial—an engraved plaque, riveted into the wall. Deor couldn’t read all of it—the text was partly runic, partly ideogrammatic. But there was a word that might have been the name Danadhar, and another that was probably Ambrosius, and an ideogram that almost certainly represented ruthen.

  “Hm!” Deor said eventually. “Well seen, my friend. This must be the very cell Morlock was imprisoned in all those many years ago. That means he’s not as crazy as he sounds. And the event seems to be important to these Gray Folk—probably because Danadhar himself became important.”

  Kelat looked at him for a moment and said, “Yes, he is important. Do you mean Morlock is really more than a hundred years old?”

  “Oh, yes. A hundred thirty—or twenty—a hundred and forty? Something like that. He was a horrible child, really—always blowing things up and terrifying people and saying the strangest things. Wonderful days, those were.”

  “Then you—”

  “I’m about the same age as he—a tad older, it may be. I’d have to look at the nest records to be sure. Haven’t worn as well, obviously.”

  “And Ambrosia?”

  “She’s a few years younger—she and her sister—whom I gather you haven’t met.”

  “No. She has never been among the Vraidish tribes.”

  “I doubt that very much, but it doesn’t surprise me you haven’t seen her. She—ah—she keeps to herself.”

  Kelat brooded over this for a few moments, then said, “Danadhar I have met. He is very old, even as the Gray Folk count the years. And they live longer than men.”

  “Well—there’s your father.”

  “Everyone knows that Ambrosia’s magic is what keeps him alive. Some say it is what made him a fool.”

  “Um. Possibly. Longevity spells exist, you see, but they have unfortunate transformative effects; one never knows quite how one will come out, but it’s very rarely for the better. That’s why Those-Who-Know tend not to use them on themselves.”

  “How were Morlock and Ambrosia transformed? How were you? You’re not crazy.”

  “Well, we haven’t, eh, been transformed. Or maybe we have. It’s part of living in the Wardlands. The land sustains you, strengthens your life. And that strength can be carried on to your offspring, which is why Ambrosia has it . . . although not in the degree Morlock has. She may age faster than he does, as the centuries pass. I know he’s worried about that.”

  “Then she will grow old and die, just like everyone else.”

  “She will, but not just like everyone else. She doesn’t seem to do anything like everyone else, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”

  “Yes, I had noticed that.”

  Deor looked sharply at the young man. He knew more about the mating practices of men and women than he did when he was a young dwarf, and he did not even need to guess that the young man was in love with Ambrosia Viviana. Fortunately, it was not his business. But he hoped that Ambrosia would deal gently with the young fool; Deor rather liked him.

  There were shouts in the corridor outside—they seemed to be coming from the other cells. “Ware plague!” the prisoners were shouting, and “Call the god-speaker!” and many other things that Deor could not quite understand.

  Kelat peered curiously out the narrow barred window of the cell. Deor walked over to stand next to him then grabbed a bar of the window to lift himself high enough to look out.

  One of the excantors was lying supine on the corridor floor outside. He was writing sinuously, and smoke was trailing from his snout. It seemed to be lengthening a bit.

  “Poor fellow,” Deor remarked to Kelat. “It’s the dragon sickness.”

  “What causes it?” asked Kelat, staring in fascination at the slowly transforming mandrake.

  “Greed. Anger. Cruelty.” Deor sighed. “You Other Ilk can indulge in these to your heart’s content. If we do it we risk losing our hands—our kin—everything that we are.”

  Kelat looked at Deor’s hand, gripping the bar, then at Deor’s face, and nodded.

  Now there was someone else in the corridor, and the prisoners began to cheer. “God-speaker! Danadhar! Save us from the plague! Save us from the Dragon!”

  It was an elderly male of the Gray Folk, wearing a kilt made of weeds. He hastened to the fallen excantor and knelt down beside him.

  Deor had been bitten by someone undergoing the dragon-change, once, and he called out in Wardic, “Hey, watch out there, cousin!” Then, realizing that would do no good, he said the same thing in Dwarvish: “Vuf! Thekhma-dhi, ruthen!”

  The elderly Gray One looked up at the sound of Deor’s voice. His long, terrible mouth gave a gray-toothed grin that may have been meant as friendly. Then he turned back to the suffering excantor.

  The god-speaker put a long-fingered, gray-clawed hand gently on each side of the excantor’s slowly lengthening face. “The choice is yours,” Danadhar said, so quietly Deor could hardly hear him. “Remember that there is a choice. Will you be as you are? Will you be as you could be? Will you become what you hate?”

  “I can’t believe in your God!” the excantor screamed.

  “What difference does that make? Belief. If I believe a stone is a mushroom, does that mean I won’t break my teeth eating it? Believe or don’t believe. What will you do? What will you be? What do you want?”

  “There is no God. Not your God. Not any god. Not really.”

  “Then, for you, there is no God. So what? What will you do? What will you be? What do you want?”

  “I want to kill,” whispered the excantor. “I want to steal. I want to lie.”

  “Yes! Yes!” said the god-speaker eagerly. “So do I. But especially to kill! How I long to run down the streets of our city, my claws dripping with fiery blood, gnashing fragments of green-gray flesh in my fangs. How I would kill, in my rage and greed! What evil glory there would be in that! I saw your daughters outside.”

  “Be quiet!” shrieked the excantor.

  “They are there, and would be easy to kill. Shall we kill them together, you and I? I will if you will.”

  “Be quiet,” begged the excantor.

  “If you go down that long, fiery path, you will have many things, but quiet will not be one of them. Nor will daughters or mates. You will be alone, in the dark, on your hoard, listening to yourself until your fire goes out.”

  “I can’t believe in your way. I can’t believe in your God.”

  “As if I asked you to! Belief. If the God exists, he needs your belief no more than the rain does, or the sea, or trees, or anything that is real. If he is not, he needs your belief no more than does up-downness or dark-lightness or anything that is unreal. You do the God no favors by believing in him. You do yourself no favors. Whom are you looking to please with this belief? Me? I am the one who just offered to help you kill your children.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” whispered the excantor.

  “Choose,” said Danadhar firmly. “What will you do? What will you be? What do you want?”

  Now the ex
cantor lay quiet on the stones. He wasn’t breathing smoke anymore. His face seemed to be returning to its former shape. He closed his burning eyes.

  There was silence in the jail.

  The excantor shook off the god-speaker’s hands and stood up. He turned to face Danadhar who stayed crouched there on the stones, looking patiently up at him.

  “I don’t need you,” the excantor said.

  “No,” Danadhar agreed. “What will you do?”

  “Leave here. I cannot fight my own ruthen-kin anymore. I will not.”

  “What will you be?”

  “Not a soldier. Not a jailor.” He looked at his hands. “I would like to build something. I love the smell of sawn wood even more than the smell of blood.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To be free.”

  “Go and be free, my son. Leave here and build something.”

  The ex-excantor nodded slowly. He took off his belt of office and dropped it on the jail floor. “Thanks be to you, Saint Danadhar,” he said.

  “Enough of that kind of talk,” said Danadhar. “Get out of here, now. Remember me to your children, eh?”

  “Are they really outside?”

  “They are, with their mothers and your co-mates. They’re all very worried about you. Go.”

  The former excantor nodded and left.

  “Free us, Saint Danadhar,” whispered someone. Then all down the corridor the shouts broke out, “Free us! Free us, Saint Danadhar!”

  “Shut up!” roared Danadhar, and silence fell.

  “I find that kind of talk very disgusting,” Danadhar continued, “and I will not countenance it. No! Absolutely not! Saint Danadhar will not free you. No saint will ever free you. Stop hoping for it.”

  He bent down and scooped up the keys from the golden belt. He walked over to the door through which Deor and Kelat were still watching him.

  “Little Cousin,” said Danadhar, “you tried to do me a favor just now.”

  Deor snorted. “Thanks for noticing, mandrake.”

  Danadhar stood back a step then smiled a long, wicked smile. “Is that offensive? I’m sorry, ruthen: I didn’t mean it so.”

  “It’s nothing,” Deor said. “Ruthen, I spoke in haste: forgive me.”

  “I’ll do a little better than that.” Danadhar went through the keys and found the one for their cell. He unlocked it.

  Deor released the bar and backed away from the door. The Gray One stood in the doorway.

  “Here are the keys,” Danadhar said, handing them to Deor. “Do with them what you will.”

  Deor rushed past him and unlocked the nearest cell. “Pass them on,” he said, handing the keys to one of the freed prisoners, and turned back to Danadhar who was still standing at the door.

  “May I know your name, ruthen?” Danadhar said politely.

  “Deor syr Theorn, cousin to the Eldest of the Seven Clans Under Thrymhaiam. My blood is yours, ruthen.”

  “Thanks! I hope I never have a use for it. And . . . ?”

  “This gentleman is Prince Uthar Kelat, son of the Vraidish King.”

  “Kelat. Kelat.” Danadhar continued in Ontilian, “It seems to me a man of that name came to speak to the God’s evil avatar some time ago. I tried to talk him out of it.”

  “That was me, God-speaker,” Kelat said. “I wish I had listened to you.”

  “Oh!” Danadhar’s eyes glanced aside in separate movements, which Deor recognized as a sign of embarrassment. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

  “It’s nothing, great Danadhar. I cannot say my blood is yours; my blood belongs to my king. But my spear is yours, to strike where you say or keep it sheathed.”

  “Sheathed, then, new friend. There has been too much killing in the city in the past year. But we must get you your spear and whatever else you came with. And whoever else. Is there someone over there?”

  “Over in the corner is my harven-kin, Morlock Ambrosius.”

  “‘Was,’ you mean,” Danadhar corrected mildly. “That’s a day I’ll never forget, though it was so long ago. If—Ruthen Morlock! It’s true!”

  The god-speaker rushed past Kelat and stopped to stand uncertainly before Morlock.

  Deor hoped that Morlock wouldn’t spoil this odd reunion with any gibberish about the inner lives of dead fish.

  The crooked man looked up and met Danadhar’s blood-colored eyes. He stood and said conversationally, “Ruthen Danadhar. I greet you.”

  “Ruthen Morlock,” the Gray One whispered. “It has been long since we last met. I have tried to keep faith with the truths you showed me on that day.”

  Deor glared at Morlock, but the crooked man shrugged uneasily. “I showed you no truths. I’m glad you saw some, though.”

  Danadhar nodded humbly and grinned his terrifying grin. “Yes. Yes. No one shows us. It is up to us to see. You are still my teacher, ruthen. Although—you seem no older than you did on that day.”

  “I am, though” Morlock said. He looked around the cell. “Where is Ambrosia?”

  “The woman who was here? The Olvinar has her, I fear,” Danadhar said sadly.

  “The Olvinar? That is your Adversary—the anti-God?”

  “Yes. He came first two years ago. He brought gifts and made friends. He called himself Lightbringer, but I perceived that was a lie. For I reasoned with myself this way, ruthenen: if the God chose to appear in an avatar of evil, showing us the consequences of doing what we must not do, why shouldn’t the Olvinar appear in an avatar that seems good, tempting us to do what is wrong, as if we will not suffer from it? Also, his conversation seemed somewhat shifty to me. He only tells truths to mask his lies.”

  “Hm. I knew a man like that once. His name was not Lightbringer, though.”

  “He is like you in form, but taller, with white hair and a beard.”

  Morlock looked at Deor, a little panic showing in his colorless bright eyes.

  “Morlock,” Deor said. “Don’t worry. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, Ambrosia is his own daughter—his favorite, from what I understand. What harm could come to her?”

  “You are not thinking what I am thinking,” Morlock said. “I fear it may already be too late.”

  In a way it was.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Second Chances

  It is odd to know that one of your oldest friends is a murderer and a traitor. Aloê found it so. Everything that passed between her and Naevros now was stained with horror. And yet he was still her friend, and the rapport between them was as close as it had ever been. He had become strange to her and horrible without ceasing to be familiar.

  And she found herself relying on him in ways both new and old. Noreê and Naevros both stopped by Jordel’s to see her in the morning: Naevros to see how she was doing, and Noreê so that they could begin the task of finding out who had stolen Earno’s last letter. Impulsively, Aloê asked Naevros to join them. Naevros was pleased, and Jordel clearly miffed. How could she tell Jordel that he was no use to her? He had no guilty knowledge to betray.

  They rode together to Thaintower, east of the wall and north of the River Ruleijn.

  “We should start with the thains who were on duty at the Arch of Tidings,” Aloê said. “I suppose you have a list?”

  “Yes,” said Noreê. “I sent a message to Earno several days before his death. Any message he sent after that would have been written after that. And a thain on duty must have stolen the palimpsest.”

  “Or they may know who stole it,” Naevros added.

  “Or we may know, after we’ve talked to the thain,” Aloê suggested. “‘Hello, trusty thain-friend! Stand my watch for a moment while I snort down a bowl of soup.’ And if the trusty friend was the thief. . . .”

  “Yes,” Noreê conceded temperately.

  “How many of the thains in question are yours?” Aloê asked.

  “All of them.”

  “Oh.” Aloê thought of the jail in Fungustown, staffed entirely with Noreê’s tha
ins. She thought of the Hall of Tidings, staffed entirely with Noreê’s thains. How much of the city did she control—or was she trying to control? The thing could become a problem. It was, perhaps, already a problem.

  Aloê met Naevros’ eye, and he nodded. She knew he was thinking the same thing. There was a comfort in knowing that someone else saw what she saw, was concerned by the same thing that concerned her.

  Of course, Naevros was a traitor and a murderer. She did not forget that.

  But how little it affected him! He sat there in the saddle, sunning himself like a cat in the thin daylight, and seemed concerned about nothing except the cut of his trousers (which kept riding up his leg as they rode). Beside him trotted perhaps the greatest seer in the world, but he was obviously not worried that some psychic effluvium would betray him as a murderer.

  Of course, he was a killer. They were all three killers. The murder of Earno seemed worse to Aloê than killing in battle, but maybe Naevros justified it to himself somehow. He could truly be innocent in his own eyes. Those pretty green eyes.

  She shook her head and snorted.

  Naevros looked at her, glanced at her horse, and smiled to himself.

  She laughed. It was funny. And he was a traitor and a murderer.

  At Thaintower they dismounted and let a couple of ostler-thains tend to their horses. Then Noreê (how they knew her there! how they truckled to her!) briskly demanded to see seven particular thains in the tower atrium.

  It was the third one to show himself: a fellow named Bavro. Aloê’s insight whispered it to her as soon as she laid eyes on him. But, to be sure, she ascended slightly into rapture and, with great difficulty, extended her hand in greeting.

  He took it. His talic self was like a glowing mist with many dark gaps—perhaps like a skeleton made of fog, but it was not a human skeleton. It was the negative of the imprint left in the message sock.

  She shook loose from her vision.

  “Where is the letter, Thain Bavro?” she asked.

  He must have suspected why he was being summoned. But perhaps he didn’t expect the question to be put so abruptly. In any case he gaped at her like a fish in a net.