by James Enge
Soon they saw what the Gray Folk had seen and paused to take it in.
The gigantic, cable-laid house at the north end of town was moving. The tower at the top that looked like a head—that was a head—wove back and forth and uttered a shriek like a straight-line wind running down a mountainside of pines.
There was red light coming from the center of the coil.
“Rukhjyrn! Rukhjyrn!” screamed someone in the crowd. The dragon-sickness! The dragon-sickness!
The gigantic snake began to move, uncoiling itself, reaching for the distant stars, shaking mundane fire from it as it moved.
“Wait!” Deor shouted, but Morlock had shouldered off his pack and was already running. There were human figures moving, dark outlines in the cascade of fire.
Morlock dashed into the burning torrent, dodging left and right to avoid planks and beams, heedless of the heat and fire.
Danadhar came to a halt beside Deor. “What happened to the Olvinar’s house?” he asked, gasping.
“Ambrosia Viviana, I think,” said Deor. “Look!”
One of the two human figures was trapped under something. The other was standing near, a strangely shining ovoid in one hand, a long blade in the other. And a beard—the dark outline definitely sported a beard. “The old bastard!” he muttered in Wardic.
“It is the Olvinar,” Danadhar said.
“It is Merlin Ambrosius,” Deor said, not disagreeing.
The trapped figure must be Ambrosia; no one else could have lived in that chaos of fire. Before Merlin could strike at her, Morlock was there. He hit the old man with the fist holding his sword. The bearded figure went flying, lost his grip on his blade, juggled the shining egg wildly, almost fell but did not quite.
Ambrosia’s voice stabbed through the flames. “Kill him, Morlock! Kill him!”
Morlock raised his damned sword.
“Morlock!” shouted Deor. “No! Xoth dhun! The bond of blood!”
Morlock’s twisted shadow paused—and sheathed the sword. He turned to where his sister lay trapped.
Danadhar ran from Deor’s side into the flames. His garments were afire at the first step, but he ignored them, going to where Morlock stood.
Merlin’s dark shape steadied, took hold of the shining egg with both hands. He seemed to look at his offspring for a moment, then turned away and was lost in the flames.
Together, Morlock and Danadhar hefted the burning beam off Ambrosia and she rolled to her feet. “Where is that demented old cutthroat?” Deor heard her demand.
He did not hear whatever Morlock and Danadhar said to her, if anything. The three came together through the burning wrack and out of it.
It was Danadhar, rather than Ambrosia, who collapsed when they emerged from the flames—except for those still flickering among the rags that had been his clothing.
“Haven’t firewalked for an age,” he said apologetically, struggling to his feet. “An intoxicating experience. Most mrmrmrblble.”
Morlock took off his smoldering cloak and handed it to the Gray One.
“Yes. Yes. Thanks, ruthen.” Danadhar took the cloak and wrapped it around his midsection as a makeshift kilt. “Wouldn’t do for the Gray Folk to see their saint naked. Though they’d find a way to explain it as a miracle.” He waved a clawed hand vaguely at the fire and the gigantic snake slithering off into the night. “Find a way to put this on me. ‘Nother miracle o’ St. Danadhar. Pardon me.” He put his hands up to his snout and literally held his mouth shut for a few moments.
“I’m sorry, ruthenen, and new friend Kelat,” he said when he released himself. “Do you not get fire-drunk?” he asked Ambrosia and Morlock.
“I feel a kind of high,” Ambrosia admitted.
“Eh. I prefer a drink-drunk,” Morlock said.
“We must empty a few jars sometime,” Danadhar said. “Ruthen,” he continued, speaking to Ambrosia, “I am Danadhar, god-speaker for this unhappy town. I am glad to meet you. I have heard much of your exploits among the Vraids.”
Ambrosia took his proffered hand without apparent fear, which is more than Deor could have done: apparently the Gray Folk around here didn’t bother trimming their nails. “I am pleased to meet you, too, God-speaker. I have heard almost nothing of you or your folk.”
“That’s how we prefer it, mighty Regent of the Vraids. We have few friends among the Other Ilk or the Little—the dwarves, I mean.”
“You have one more as of tonight.”
Danadhar spread his claws wide and placed his scaly palms on his ventral shield—evidently a gesture of respect.
“Listen, God-speaker, my brother may or may not have mentioned it, but we have good reason for trying to speak to your God. Is there any way you can get us across the battle lines? Both sides seem to respect you.”
“You can speak to my God here or anywhere, Lady Ambrosia. But I take it you mean the evil avatar that lives in the temple.”
“I do.”
Danadhar bowed his head. “Yes,” he said. “I can and I will. I must ask you not to trust him.”
Kelat snorted. Danadhar turned to look at him in surprise.
“In Vraidish,” Deor explained, “that means, ‘I think you can count on us following your excellent advice.’”
Whether godstruck or godhater, the Gray Folk did indeed honor Danadhar. As he led the four travelers away from the fire, many of the Gray Folk who had gathered to watch went down on their knees and shouted his name. The others, godhaters perhaps, put their hands on their bellies and bowed.
One Gray stepped in front of them. He had the braided belt of an excantor, and he carried a blood-stained pike in his hand.
“Saint Danadhar,” he said tentatively.
“I am Danadhar. I don’t know what a saint is.”
“Those Other Ilk with you—it was the Olvinar’s order that they should be kept in confinement.”
“The Enemy is gone. You see behind us the ruin of his house.”
The excantor closed his eyes, opened them. “Then the rebellion is over.”
“No,” said Danadhar firmly. “If you look at that thing poisoning the temple and rebel against it, the rebellion goes on. May it never be over. Believe or disbelieve in the God, but rebel against evil when you see it—and the more powerful it is, the more you must rebel. I charge you with it, excantor.”
The excantor stood straighter. “Then I must not let you pass. I must carry out the Olvinar’s commands, though he is no longer here to give them.”
“You must do as you think right. You may kill me, if you like, as I see you have killed others of our blood. But, unless you do, I will pass by you and bring these four to the temple.”
From the way Morlock was standing, Deor knew that he was about to draw his sword. If he did, the conscientious excantor would go to seek the truth or untruth of all religions in the afterlife, of this Deor had no doubt. But would that bring the godhaters in the crowd down on them.
But the excantor lowered his pike and turned away.
Danadhar led them into the burning heart of the city where the Gray Folk fought for and against their God and each other. Each time weapons were directed at him or the four travelers, he talked calmly and rationally and urgently, and they passed on unharmed.
What he could not prevent, or did not try to prevent, was this: they were followed. The godstruck and the godhaters, silent warriors and singing excantors, every Gray One who saw them seemed to join the parade.
They came at last to the temple, stark in the moonslight.
“I will not go in with you,” Danadhar said quietly. “The hate I feel for the avatar is dangerous for my soul.”
Morlock grabbed him by the arm, released him. They nodded at each other. Morlock vaulted up the steps of the temple and the other three travelers followed more slowly.
“I’ve never met a god before,” Deor whispered to Kelat. “What’s it like?”
“I don’t remember it very well,” said the Vraid.
The interior of the temple was a s
tudy in gold and red. Gold coins and objects covered the floor of the many-pillared temple, and the whole was lit only by the fiery eyes of the dragon who lay across this immense hoard.
It was a dragon . . . and it was a device. Cables ran into the dragon’s fiery eyes and into his ears. They attached him to a crystalline machine anchored to the gold-heaped floor. The machine, the dragon’s eyes, and the gigantic jewel imprisoned in his metallic right foreleg, all radiated a fiery flickering light.
Angular elements moved within the crystalline device; images seemed to come and go. Deor itched to take the thing apart and see how it worked, but he put his hands under his arms and tried to quell the feeling. He avoided looking the dragon in the eye. He’d had one case of dragonspell a long time ago and hadn’t enjoyed it much.
Of course, I knew you were coming, said the dragon.
Morlock grunted. “Eh. Here we are, anyway.”
Then the Graith will consider my proposal?
“No.”
Perhaps you yourselves will make the trade that I proposed—will guide me to a fresh world in return for what I have learned?
“No.”
Will you aid me against the godhaters who would enter this temple and slay me?
“No.”
Then why have you come?
“To learn what you know of the dying sun.”
You ask everything; you offer nothing. We will reach no agreement on these terms, Ambrosius.
“We’ll save the world, if we can. If you are in the world, that’s not nothing.”
If the world could have been saved, I would have saved it. I am not called the God here for no reason.
“But you are not, in fact, God,” Morlock pointed out. “We may be able to do what you can’t.”
Doubtful.
“We destroyed the Two Powers.”
They are worshipped still in Vakhnhal and through the Anhikh Kômos. Their missionaries walk west and south and north. For all I know, their apostles sail to Qajqapca.
“You see through countless eyes. Have you seen the Two Powers since they nailed you here?”
The dragon’s tail moved restlessly across his hoard. No, he admitted at last.
“Then?”
No! Nothing for nothing! That’s my law, Ambrosius.
“If the world dies, you will die and all your knowledge will be lost.”
You can’t save the world. Old Ambrosius could not. I cannot. No one can.
“Convince us.”
Nothing for nothing.
Outside the temple, Danadhar was speaking to the crowd. They could hear no words, but they did hear the thunder of the crowd’s response; it shook the pillars of the temple.
“I think your time here is done, Rulgân Silverfoot,” Morlock said. “Where will you spend the last days of the dying world?”
The dragon snarled.
Morlock waited.
Deor almost spoke, but Ambrosia caught his eye and shook her head.
Nothing for nothing! the dragon said. If I tell you what you want to know, will you help me escape from here?
Morlock considered briefly. “Yes,” he said.
The dragon submerged his snout in gold and grumbled a bit. Then he raised up his face and said, Agreed. I will self-bind to tell you what I know. You will self-bind to assist me to escape, if there is any trouble. There is going to be trouble, from what I see out in the town square.
“No binding magics,” Morlock said. “You’ll have to trust me.”
The dragon glared and lashed his tail, sending gold coins skittering around the temple chamber. Morlock looked Rulgân in the eye and waited.
Agreed! the dragon rumbled at last.
“Then.”
The dragon spoke.
Ambrosius, when last you saw me I was very new in my godhood. I could use the temple of the mandrakes to see through their eyes and ears, but I could not control their wills. Nor can I always do so now. I must lure a mandrake into surrendering its will to mine, a long, tedious business sometimes. The first was Skellar, who you may remember as god-speaker here on your last visit. He walked abroad, servile to my will, unable to live as a mandrake or be reborn as a dragon.
It amused me to send him to places he hated to go. For instance, he feared water, so I made him swim across the Sea of Stones. He feared the Little Cousins, so I sent him as my emissary to the Endless Empire under the Blackthorns. And he feared the cold, so I sent him north to the end of the world.
His eyes were my eyes, and his ears were my ears, but his pain was not my pain. I left him will enough to seek his own survival when threatened, but not enough to resist my commands. He spent some time in the city of werewolves, Wuruyaaria; you would be amused to hear his adventures there, perhaps. But the geas I placed on him drove him ever further north, through the grim, bright rind of the world where beasts become strange, until he stood at the furthest point north where a beast with two feet may walk; beyond was only sky, blue emptiness like Merlin’s eyes.
There is a bridgehead there, where the world ends, and the bridge runs through the sky into another world. Standing on the bridge was a thing that had neither hands nor feet nor body nor anything that could be seen. But it was there: Skellar felt the imprint of its angular intelligence on his own.
He stood there for a long time, void of purpose. I had told him to go north but had not said what he should do when there.
The presence on the bridge spun a mouth made of ice in the middle air. It used the mouth to say, “Why are you here?”
“I was sent,” Skellar answered.
“Who sent you?”
“God.”
“Which god?”
“The God.”
“Was it one of the Two Powers?”
Skellar hesitated. “No.”
“The-one-you-would-call-I,” said the thing on the bridgehead, “senses an association. Is the God who sent you the Balancer?”
Skellar thought. It was difficult for him because I had not allowed him to do much of this since I took him over. “I don’t know,” he said after a time—a great deal of time, it seemed to me, when I assimilated his memories.
“Is your God akin to the Two Powers?”
Now Skellar thought of the day when I came to his town, and the miracles the Two Powers worked on my behalf, and how he helped them install me in the temple. So he said, “Yes.”
“You are to report to whom-you-would-call-me,” the presence said.
“I don’t understand,” Skellar said.
The presence seized his mind, broke it open like the seal on a message, and read it.
That was when I noticed what was happening. You cannot always be looking out of every pair of eyes available to you—not when you have as many of them as I do. But the presence now touched the bond that pertained between me and my mandrake.
“Who are you?” the presence said to me, through Skellar.
I took the time I needed to assimilate Skellar’s memories. The presence waited: they have no impatience, these things—no real sense of time.
“I am the one true God of the mandrakes,” I said. “Who are you?”
“You would not understand the-one-you-call-me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you would call the-one-you-would-call-me me.”
“That appears to me to be nonsense, and I require the services of my mandrake.”
It tried to seize control of my will through the bond, but I was ware of it and resisted. We fought much of a day and night in the arena of Skellar’s mind: I watched the shadows change, grow, diminish, change.
In the end it seized Skellar’s mind and dragged it from his body, over the edge of the world and across the bridge that spans the abyss.
I let the bond persist. Why not? Skellar would not be much use anymore, even if he lived, so the knowledge I gained from his suffering would be the last yield I could expect from him.
I can’t tell you how much time passed, since beyond the barrier of the worl
d I found neither sun nor moons nor stars nor anything that I could understand as marking time or change.
There are no people there. I soon understood this. Each of these presences was the same as the other—like different coins, from different places, different writing on them, but all the same, too: stack them one on another and you cannot tell one from the other.
The presence who had taken Skellar and me dragged us to a place where several other presences were. They merged or conferred or something. Now it was the same presence, but more forceful, with more knowledge. They gathered other pieces, apparently at random, and the presence grew.
They did not speak to me anymore. They made patterns of knowledge and they expected me to fit mine into theirs. Perhaps I did! Not much of what I knew would be of interest to them. But I knew that the Wastelands had been freed of the soul-killing power that dwelt there, and that the Two Powers were no longer to be found abroad in the world. Perhaps they know that now, too.
Most of what they knew, I could not understand. But I saw that they were hostile to light, and life, and they had a plot to kill the sun and pass into our world after its death.
I was losing myself in their patterns . . . becoming the kind of nothing that each of them was. I saw with my other eyes that much time had passed, and I broke the bond with Skellar. His mind may still live and suffer there, but I cannot reach it.
That was a generation of men or mandrakes ago. Now we see the sun dying, and the world with it. Is it any wonder that I seek escape?
Morlock stood listening intently, his head bowed, staring past the dragon as if he were looking all the way to the end of the world.
“Then,” he said at last.
The dragon roared in fury that shook the pillars of his temple. Will you speak in whole sentences, you vague, grunting gutworm!
“Not about this,” Morlock said. “Not to you.”
The dragon grumbled into his gold and then said, I care not. Fulfill your word or break it, Ambrosius.
“Wait,” said Kelat, causing Deor and Ambrosia to glance at him in surprise.
The dragon looked at him, a deadly amusement in his fiery eyes. Yes, son of man?
“You stole my mind, when I was last here. I demand . . . I demand compensation.”