The Wide World's End

by James Enge

  “What—what—?” he said.

  “The letter, Thain Bavro, the letter!” Noreê said angrily.

  “The palimpsest you stole from the Arch of Tidings,” Aloê explained kindly. “Earno’s last letter.”

  “Where is it, Thain Bavro?”

  “Who did you steal it for? Who are you working with?”

  Bavro glanced desperately (and most revealingly, Aloê thought) at Naevros, who stood silent through all this. Whatever Bavro saw in those pretty green eyes made him quail.

  “I cannot tell,” he said sullenly at last. “I cannot tell.”

  “You will tell, Guardian!” Noreê insisted. “If not now, then later. If not to us, then to the assembled Graith on the Witness Stone.”

  “But the Witness Stone is broken, and—” Bavro stopped suddenly.

  “Bleys tells me the Stone can be healed,” Noreê said. “But we may not have to wait so long. Take off your cape of office, Bavro; you don’t deserve it.”

  Bavro looked at each of the vocates in turn. He reached up and undid the fastenings at his shoulder, letting the gray cape fell to the floor.

  “You will come with me to the lockhouse, there to await the Graith’s pleasure. Guardians, will you come with us?”

  “He may have hidden the palimpsest here, somewhere,” Aloê said. “I’ll stay and have a look around.”

  “I’ll help,” Naevros said.

  Noreê nodded curtly. She took Bavro by the elbow and steered him out the door. All the thains in the atrium followed her out, the sheep following their shepherd.

  “I do not like this private army she is making of the thainate,” Aloê remarked.

  “A thousand soldiers and one general,” Naevros agreed. “Yes, something will have to be done. . . .”

  After some searching and asking questions of passing thains, they finally found their way to the narrow little room that Bavro called home. They took their time searching it. It needed time: the little room was layered in dirty clothes, books, pieces of uneaten food, badly drawn pornographic art, and string, which Bavro seemed to collect obsessively.

  “This place is filthier than my house,” Naevros remarked at one point, “and that’s saying something.”

  “What?” Aloê said. “Have you cast off the irreproachable Verch at last?”

  Verch was Naevros’ housekeeper. They had been quarrelling on a daily basis since before Aloê was born . . . usually because Verch was trying to tell Naevros how to live his life.

  “He’s an intolerable old queck-bug, and I should fire him, as a matter of fact. Only I’ve long suspected I couldn’t manage without him, and now I know it. I always thought of myself as a fairly neat person; I can take care of myself handily when I’m travelling. But one little house seems to generate more filth in a day than I can clear away in three. I’m counting the hours until he returns.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Nearly a month! He got it in his head he wanted to go south where it’s warm. I could hardly say no. I hope he hates it down there.”

  “Couldn’t you hire a housekeeper to take care of you while he’s gone?”

  “I—ah—I made rather a big deal about how I could take care of myself without any help. Somehow I’m going to have to figure out how to do it or I’ll never hear the end of his nagging.”

  “If you could use help—”

  “No, no. Thanks. My mess; I’ll tend to it. What is this, do you think?” He held up a dark strip of something he had excavated from the floor. “Is it a piece of dried meat gone bad, or an article of underclothing worn far longer than it should have been, or . . . ?”

  In the end they had to admit that the palimpsest was not in the filthy little room.

  “Dollon was also stationed at Thaintower, I think,” Aloê said. “Perhaps it’s in his room. Assuming they are part of a larger conspiracy.” Headed by you, Aloê wanted to say but did not.

  “Possibly,” Naevros said agreeably. “Should we search it, too?”

  A cold, clear light went on in Aloê’s mind.

  “Or it could be in Fungustown,” she said, saying something quite different from her thought. “A lot of empty buildings there.”

  “Er. Yes.”

  “Maybe I should look in one place and you look in the other?”

  “Maybe you should have someone watching your back, Guardian,” said Naevros drily, and pointed at the healing silk on her neck.

  “Hm,” Aloê pretended to consider. “Yes, that’s a good point. Maybe I’ll pick up Jordel on my way to Fungustown. We can cover more ground that way, too.”

  Naevros nodded. “You have your ducks in a row, I see. I’ll carry on here. Some of the other thains may know something we want to know. And I’ll plant a few seeds of doubt about Noreê’s leadership, maybe.”

  Aloê nodded brightly and ran off. She clattered down the stairs, freed Raudhfax from the attentions of the ostlers, and galloped away toward Jordel’s.

  But after she had crossed a few roads and she saw that Thaintower was lost in the thicket of towers behind her, she turned sharply west and rode straight to Naevros’ house, not far from the Old Center.

  She believed that Verch had voluntarily left the house of Naevros for a month like she believed the sun was an orange ball of bubbling cheese—that is, not at all (although it did sort of resemble one these days). That old queck-bug loved Naevros more than his own life. So he was gone now because Naevros had wanted him out of the house. Aloê wanted to know why.

  The house was locked, of course, but she had not lived with Morlock and his harven-kin without learning a great deal about locks—how they could be made, how they could be beaten. The locks at Naevros’ house were merely mechanical—they didn’t even have eyes or ears! Aloê was inside within moments of her arrival.

  Inside, she found the place a bit dusty, but nothing like the sty Naevros had pretended. He’d been lying, of course. She knew it; she felt it through the bond they shared. But she might have revealed herself to him the same way: she must hurry.

  First fruits of her search were scraps of a blood-stained palimpsest: Earno’s letter to Morlock: the original, she thought, not the one stolen from the Arch of Tidings. The slightest ascent into the visionary realm told her that the blood was Earno’s. She scanned the letter quickly then pocketed it. It was of some importance to her husband, but not for this matter.

  But the full harvest of her search came in the basement. She found a bloody bagful of spell-anchors. And a body: Denynê. The body of the binder was bound: hand, feet, eyes, and mouth. And . . . it moved.

  She was still alive! Aloê’s eyes stung with sudden tears and she threw herself to her knees beside the bound binder.

  “Denynê!” she whispered. “It’s Vocate Aloê! I’m going to untie you. We must get you out of here quickly.”

  Denynê seemed to be sobbing through her gag. Aloê slit her bonds with the knife from her belt, cutting the gag and blindfold last.

  The binder grabbed her and hugged her hysterically, babbling something into her hair.

  “What?” Aloê said. “What is it?”

  “I didn’t believe anyone would come for me,” Denynê gasped. “I thought I would die here, wherever this is, in my own filth. I thought no one cared. No one ever has. My family never . . . and then there was the Skein, and that was good. But I understand things so much better than people. They said . . . they said. . . . And now. . . . No one cared. I thought no one cared.”

  “I damn well do.”

  “You must think me disgusting. Weeping, snot-nosed coward. Out of control from fear. Not like you.”

  “We’ll settle what you are and what I think of it when we get you the canyon out of here. Do you think you can walk?”

  “Oh, yes. I did exercises as I lay here. It’s very bad for the muscles to lie idle, even when you’re not bound. I should be able to walk.”

  “You lay here and did exercises, waiting for a chance you didn’t think would come, just so
you’d be ready when it did. I hate to break it to you, Binder, but that’s not what a coward, out of control with fear, would do. I’m going to help you up now, and we’ll see what good those exercises did.”

  Denynê was a little unsteady on her feet, but she could move. They moved, as fast as she could, up the stairs.

  Aloê was terrified that they would not get away—that Naevros would appear at the last moment and they would be foiled. She feared his prowess at the sword, his anger and shame when he understood he’d been found out. She wasn’t sure she could protect Denynê or herself.

  But now they were out on the street in the cool afternoon air. Aloê didn’t bother relocking the door. She got Denynê up into Raudhfax’s saddle and then mounted behind her.

  No one shouted at them as they rode off.

  Aloê was exultant. She felt like a poor man who reached into his pocket and found a fistful of coins. She felt like she had when she first dove off Cape Torn into the Bitter Bright Deep. She felt like her heart was an anvil, struck repeatedly by a golden hammer of joy.

  She always remembered that feeling, in spite of what happened after.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Enemies of the Enemy

  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, my dear,” Merlin said soothingly to his favorite daughter. He was wheeling in a long table made of glass—long enough to hold a human body. Hers specifically. She could see more glassware—tubing, alembics, and such—through the open archway, where some potion seemed to be distilling itself. But her eyes kept returning to the glass egg and the long glass table next to it. That was where her father proposed to kill her.

  “Don’t hurry on my account,” she remarked conversationally.

  “Ha ha ha. Of course, you would feel that way.” Now he was assembling a set of surgical tools, taking the bright pieces of metal out of an invisible box under the glass table and laying them out next to the crystal egg and the horror within it. “But,” Merlin prattled on as he worked, “when I have to kill someone, I really think it unconscionable to make them wait for it. Especially when I have such warm feelings of personal regard for them, as I have for you.”

  “Warmly regard my vulva, you scum-bubbling bucket of rancid old pus.”

  “You were always a bad-tempered selfish girl. Can’t you see what this will mean to your mother and me?”

  “When was the last time you had a conversation with my mother, as opposed to doing things to her that you thought would be for her benefit?”

  “Your mother is rather difficult to have a conversation with these days, on account of her being so very crazy. But I’m confident that when her sanity returns—”

  “How could her sanity ever return when she finds you have put her into the eviscerated corpse of her daughter?”

  “Now, now. Let’s not get hysterical. Most of your viscera will remain intact; really that’s essential for my plan.”

  “And you have a great deal of confidence in your plans, despite all evidence to the contrary?”

  “Naturally, I adapt to changing circumstances. A plan is not a contract with the future, but an approach to a problem. As the problem changes, as circumstances change, plans must change to fit. I admit the current plan is very far from my first, best thought. I still think that the dragon’s frame is most suitable for the graft, at least temporarily.”

  “Why not go find another one? There must be quite a few wandering around the Burning Range and its environs.”

  “I’ve tried that already, but the graft didn’t take.”

  “I should think not. The bodies must be utterly incompatible.”

  “You’re too material in your thinking, my dear. A shame: you were once such a promising seer. No, the barrier was immaterial. But when I tried implanting your mother into a mandrake corpse—”

  “Death and Justice!”

  “—I found there was a spiritual connection between the mandrake and something else that your mother’s psyche responded to. I searched long in visionary wanderings for the answer, but eventually understood. This dragon they worship here as a god: he is connected to every mandrake in the world through some sort of device built into the temple.”

  “Yes, Morlock says it was a gift from the Two Powers for putting the finger on him.”

  “A vulgar locution. You do your teachers no credit, young lady.”

  “Eh.”

  “None of that now. At your worst you never sounded like him.”

  “Is it this mandrake device that makes Rulgân a suitable host for the graft?”

  “At first I thought so, but now I think it’s incidental. Morlock wounded him, you know, with a magical weapon, Saijok’s Bane.”

  “I remember the story.”

  “It was his focus of power. It bound the two together in a way I think neither understands. Anyway, that would serve as an immaterial basis to sustain the material graft, once the dragon’s brain and other traces of identity were removed. Such was my thought. But all that seems to be otiose at the moment because of this ridiculous religious war.”

  “Which you started.”

  “Now there you do me an injustice, my dear. Really, Ambrosia, you do. I came to these people, loosely speaking, who were subject to the basest superstition imaginable, and I freed mind after mind. They really looked upon me as their liberator. They call me Lightbringer, you know.”

  “Another alias for your collection.”

  “I do like it. I may start using it generally.”

  “Not Olvinar, or—”

  “Well, that was their idea, too, but I took to it because the God was so oppressively horrible. He really is, you know. And the Enemy of their enemy . . . you know how the rest goes.”

  “What was the hitch, then?”

  “This local god-speaker was the hitch. They hate the God, but they love this Danadhar. Hate is fairly easy to manipulate, but love is more stubborn, more selfless, more trouble all around.”

  “You might understand it better if you could bring yourself to feel it.”

  “That’s good, coming from you. Bad-tempered, selfish girl.” He delicately tested the sharpness of a bonesaw with his thumb and nodded, satisfied.

  “So the mandrakes rallied around this Danadhar?”

  “They don’t like being called mandrakes, Ambrosia. They really don’t.”

  “So?”

  “I see what you mean. Well, some of the mandrakes rallied around Danadhar, and some of them rallied around their new friend, Lightbringer the Adversary. Me, in short. And this slow indecisive civil war is the result. They’re so terribly reluctant to kill each other, you see. And you can’t have a really successful war without a certain amount of killing.”

  “I know.”

  “Yes, I suppose you do. Meanwhile, your mother isn’t getting any younger, and the sun isn’t getting any healthier. I’d resolved to wait the war out—perhaps assassinate this inconvenient god-speaker—when a mantia told me that you were coming. And I think that brings us up to date.”

  A mantia, a spell of foretelling, was, in Ambrosia’s view, a fool’s game . . . but then, in so many ways, for all his cunning, her father was a fool. “So,” she said, “you’re ready to kill me, I take it?”

  “Not at all, my dear. Also, a more charitable way to look at it is that I’m giving you the opportunity to keep your mother alive.”

  Ambrosia looked at the glassy egg in which shadows, flitting lights, and green-gray brain meat floated. “She won’t thank you for this, Merlin. Believe me. I know her better than you do.”

  “You may be right, Ambrosia. I suppose you are right. But I am not doing this to be thanked. Only a fool acts with that motive, and I think you’ll concede that I am not a fool.”

  Ambrosia never had, and never would concede this, but it hardly seemed important to say so just then. Merlin puttered around with his shining instruments of darkness for a while longer and said, “Excuse me, my dear. I have to see how that potion is getting along.”

  “I g
ive you leave to go,” Ambrosia said in her most regal (I-am-the-Regent-and-you’re-not) tone.

  Merlin snickered and ducked into the next room.

  Ambrosia put her head back against the scaly wall. She did not think so much as feel. These might be the last sensations she ever had—the last things she saw, heard, smelled. . . .

  A fishy, snaky sort of smell. What had he said about the fish-beast?

  . . . your blood would almost certainly have poisoned it . . .

  She looked down at the scaly arms imprisoning her. Did she feel a long, slow pulse within them, akin to something in the wall?

  . . . your blood would almost certainly have poisoned it . . .

  If the arms were alive, they could feel pain. They would react. They might react by crushing her. Yes, it would be a very dangerous risk to take, if she weren’t about to die anyway.

  . . . your blood . . .

  Ambrosia bit her tongue—not metaphorically, but literally, hard enough to draw blood. Then again to ensure a lot of blood. Her mouth filled with it.

  She spat the bright, burning blood down on the snaky arms imprisoning her.

  The blood of Ambrose, the blood that betrayed their kinship with mandrakes, caused almost anything to burn. Anything but the Ambrosii themselves.

  Her heart fell. The blood pooled, fuming, on hollow places in the snakelike arms, but the arms didn’t react. The floor below began to burn as the blood dripped on it, but the arms holding her just went on being arms and went on holding her.

  Well, it wasn’t like she had another plan to fall back on. She wasn’t Merlin Ambrosius, adapting to circumstances. She was Ambrosia Viviana, and she made circumstances adapt to her. She spat another mouthful of burning blood on the arms.

  Then she saw their surfaces ripple like water. Perhaps the pain impulses had needed to travel all the way to the house’s reptile brain, wherever that was, before there came a reaction. Perhaps the blood just needed to burn through the outer, tougher layers of skin before it could be felt. In any case, the arms were feeling it now.

  She spat a third time. There were fuming craters in the snaky arms, and their reptilian muscles began to contract: she could see them move through the holes burned in the skin. For a moment she thought the arms were indeed going to crush her, but they just slid around her and contracted into the wall—trying to retreat from the fiery poison of her blood. She fell to the floor among the flames she had kindled.