The Wide World's End

by James Enge

  “Wuruklendono!” suggested Liyurriu. At least, it seemed to be a suggestion.

  “Viviana,” decided Ambrosia. “Everyone agreed? Think I care? Let’s get aboard and get aloft, then.”

  They wedged themselves into the gondola, sitting sideways, each of them at a set of pedals and manuals.

  “I’ll take us up,” Morlock said, and closed his eyes. Presently, they saw his irises glowing through the thin skin of his eyelids.

  This was the part that Deor knew but didn’t fully understand. Somehow, the two Ambrosii could keep the warmer air in the gasbags and expel the cold air. Eventually, the gasbags would all be full of hot air and lift into the sky and float away, like a politician’s promise.

  The body of the airship began to lift from the ground.

  Presently, its vast bulk was overhead and they were sitting upright. Ambrosia took her belt and lashed Morlock’s left arm to the rail of the gondola. “Can’t have him falling out,” she observed.

  Deor was not afraid of heights. He had spent much of his life in mountains, and had frequently amused himself by climbing crumbling rock faces with his bare hands and feet. He was able to look down and see clouds below him with nothing more in his mind than a mild curiosity about whether it was raining below.

  What he didn’t like, what he had never been able to like, what he never would like, was the knowledge that nothing was beneath him. The ground out of which he had been hatched would never betray him; he knew it too well. But he had not been hatched for the air.

  Now they were getting high—several man-lengths above the ground and getting higher. Kelat was looking over the edge with considerable interest. Ambrosia was eyeing the glass furnace overhead. Liyurriu, seated just behind him, began a subvocal murmur that carried shrill tones of panic.

  Deor was afraid, too. He was afraid that the wooden frame would fall apart and that they would fall. He was afraid that the glass furnace would run out of control, the gasbags would burn, and they would fall. He was afraid that the wind would come and tip them over and they would fly out of the gondola and fall. Then the earth, whom he had betrayed by leaving, would kill him for his betrayal. He was afraid.

  But he was bored by his fear. It was always the same. And would it really be so terrible to die? There were worse things, if the teachers of his youth spoke true.

  He looked over the rail of the gondola.

  They were now quite high and it was becoming quite cold. Kelat’s teeth were chattering, and it was not because he was frightened. He looked as eager as a miner following a vein of ore. It was strangely cold. It must be—

  “Ambrosia!” said Deor. “The cold air is cascading down the gasbags.”

  “Yes,” said Ambrosia. “That—that should be fixable.” She closed her eyes and ascended into vision. Deor saw blue circles through her closed eyes. But she sat upright and one of her hands rested lightly on the gondola rail; the other was on Kelat’s shoulder.

  She was a great seer—far greater than Morlock, who was great enough to have defeated Bleys in at least one notable test of power. Deor wondered at it, but the Sight was not one of his talents, even in the smallest degree.

  The light in her eyes faded, and she opened them. The chill draft from above had ceased.

  “We’ll try to keep the cold air away from the gondola,” she said. “It depends—”

  “Madam, I don’t mean to be rude, but I would hate to see you waste your time. Unless you think that Kelat can benefit by the explanation.”

  Ambrosia grinned. “Canyon keep you then, you stiff-necked dwarven non-seer.”

  “The same to you, harven.”

  They were well over the city of Narkunden now, and the face of the city bore the scars of violence. Two factions were demolishing buildings to make walls around their neighborhoods. Much of the city seemed to be empty. The docks down at the base of the bluff were burning and the bridge between Narkunden and Aflraun was broken.

  “Morlock, Morlock,” Ambrosia said sadly. “What were you thinking?”

  Deor was stung by this. “He was thinking that many in the city were starving while others grew fat. Or so I believe, madam.”

  “Of course he was. But good intentions are no substitute for skill in any art, least of all the art of governance. A man named Ambrosius came to a town. His intentions were not malicious, at least not wholly so. He ignited a civil war and then went his way, and the evil he had begun continued to burn its way through the city. Am I talking about Merlin in Grarby or Morlock in Narkunden?”

  “It’s not the same,” Deor said stoutly.

  “Why not? Either Morlock knew the harm he would do by destroying the monetary system of the city, or he did not. He was either malicious or ignorant.”

  Deor wanted to defend his harven-kin. But he could not quite. Deor knew Morlock understood something of the economics of scarcity: they depended on it when they sold gems and other goods in the marketplace in A Thousand Towers. So why had he let the golden genie out of the bottle?

  Deor muttered something and would have let the subject drop, but Ambrosia squeezed Kelat’s shoulder and said, “What do you think, Prince Uthar?”

  The Vraidish boy said slowly, “People have what they can hold. Only that.”

  “So? Morlock did them no harm by making their gold as worthless as paper?”

  “Paper isn’t worthless. It can carry a promise—a love letter—news.”

  “You’re getting subtle, my friend. Perhaps you should go in for philosophy rather than kingship. No matter what some people have written, the two things have little to do with each other.”

  “I’m not interested in being king and I’m not going to be king, but you haven’t seen what I mean yet.”

  “Maybe you haven’t said it.”

  “People had a choice of what to do with the knowledge Morlock gave. If they used it as a weapon, it was because they were already at war. Morlock did not help that. But he did not begin it, either.”

  “You’ve given me something to think about,” Ambrosia admitted, and none of them spoke for some time.

  They were high enough now that the city below was getting hazy. Aflraun, across the steep river valley, was even vaguer, wrapped in its own smoke. The vistas opened up in every direction were terrifying to Deor, but he would not look away from them. He filled his eyes and his mind with cold light and empty distance. The fear didn’t go away, but it began to seem a small thing—smaller, even, than he was.

  They continued to rise. And they were drifting northward: Narkunden was now under their keel.

  The land was a vague memory below them, and the cities on the Nar well behind them when Deor broke a long silence to say, “It is warmer.”

  “And we’re moving faster,” Ambrosia agreed. “We’re entering the sunstream.”

  The change was gradual but unmistakable. The distant earth began to blur even more. The clouds, nearer to them now, gave their real sense of movement. The wind at their backs drove them faster, ever faster.

  “This is faster than a hippogriff!” Deor called back, and Kelat laughed.

  “That ridiculous cart you were riding?” Ambrosia called forward.

  “No—actual hippogriff.”

  “What a liar you are, Deor. When did you ever ride a hippogriff?”

  Deor ignored the fact that his harven-kin had made a remark that, under Thrymhaiam, would have entitled him to kill her with impunity. They were not under Thrymhaiam, and Ambrosia never had been. Instead, he and Kelat told her the tale, which involved telling other tales.

  The wind at their backs held all through the day. They worked the pedals and manuals sometimes, to build up charges in the impulse wells and to give their arms and legs something to do: there was no room to move about the little gondola.

  When the sun set, the wind faded. It did not quite disappear, and it was difficult in the dark to say how much they had slowed.

  “Should we set down?” Deor called back. “Anchor and, er, stretch our legs
?”

  “No,” Ambrosia said firmly. “It’s not like we’re going to crash into anything. Any progress is better than no progress; we have a long road before us.”

  “But . . . I mean. . . .”

  “And if ‘stretch your legs’ is some kind of Dwarvish euphemism, then I encourage you to swing your ass over the side and let go.”

  “Madam.”

  “Deor. Should I have put it more sweetly?”

  “No! I suppose you’re right.”

  “I’ll go first, if you gentlemen don’t mind. I should relieve Morlock, but I have to relieve myself first.”

  “Only one of us is a man, madam, but I don’t suppose we object.”

  Actually, Deor thought he could hear Kelat goggling from where he sat, two benches back, but the young fellow would have to come to terms with life’s undignified details sooner or later.

  “Thanks, all. You make up in gentility what you lack in humanity.” She kicked off her underclothing and climbed over the side to relieve herself while Deor and Kelat looked politely away and Liyurriu watched with patient interest. When she was back aboard and dressing herself she said, “Carry on, gentles. I think we should go one at a time, lest we overbalance.”

  Or in balanced pairs, Deor almost suggested . . . but that might be impossible. Since his fellow males seemed disinclined to take the plunge, Deor skinned off his trousers and climbed over the edge of the gondola.

  Now it was his turn to be watched with shameless and unflinching interest by the werewolf Liyurriu. It made concentrating on the task at hand almost impossible. Then Liyurriu reached forward and grabbed Deor’s forearms with his apish hands. Deor was so startled he almost lost his grip—and then he realized the werewolf was doing his best to help.

  Deor appreciated it. He was terrified of falling. But Trumpeter, the minor moon, was standing in the western sky right behind him, shining with bitter brightness directly into the werewolf’s eyes. Deor felt he was making an unpleasant spectacle of himself. But mounting terror, in the end, came to his aid and he evacuated his bowels and bladder and climbed back aboard while his gifts were still speeding their way toward the distant earth.

  “And this is the worst,” he shouted back to Morlock. “The worst. Nothing on this trip will be worse than this, not if we die the second death.”

  Morlock, by now returned from visionary rapture, but just barely, said, “Eh.” The fact that he was four benches back saved Deor from the guilt of kinslaying.

  Morlock was groggily aware that Deor was angry at him, but he wasn’t really sure why. He hoped it wasn’t important. Perhaps Deor was simply backing into anger to avoid fear. If that were so, Morlock would fight all night with his harven-kin, once he shook the shadows from his head.

  They drifted northward through a dark sea of air, past towering islands and continents of cloud, bright as the major moons in the west, blue and mysterious as Deor’s mood in the east.

  Morlock answered the call of nature with the only reply possible, and ate and drank sparingly from the stores in his pack. Kelat had cocooned himself in a sleeping cloak, and Morlock felt much inclined to follow his lead and do the same. Visionary rapture was not sleep, despite how it seemed to onlookers, and Morlock was deeply weary.

  But there was something he must attend to first.

  He climbed onto his bench and stepped across to Kelat’s. The Vraid started and pulled back the hood of his sleeping cloak to peer curiously at Morlock.

  “You,” Morlock said to the werewolf on the next bench. “What are you, really?”

  The wolvish face looked on him, its reflective eyes as bright as little moons. After a moment, it opened its jaws and said carefully, “Liyurriu.”

  “I didn’t ask your name,” Morlock said. “Though I don’t doubt you are lying to me about that. I asked what you are.”

  The wolvish eyes looked at him. The wolvish mouth did not answer him.

  “You may not speak this language,” Morlock said. (He was speaking the vulgar Ontilian they used in Narkunden and Aflraun.) “But I think you understand it. You showed me you did when you told me your name just now. Do you understand me?”

  Liyurriu did not say anything, but after a moment he nodded curtly.

  “Will you tell me what you are?” Morlock asked.

  Hesitantly, the wolvish head shook: no.

  “Will you tell me why you are here?”

  Liyurriu shook his head again—reluctantly, it seemed to Morlock, but definitely.

  “Is it because you cannot? I can see that you might be able to understand a language but not speak it. We can bring Ambrosia out of her vision so that she can translate. Or you can tell her rather than me. Will you?”

  A long pause. Liyurriu closed his moonbright eyes, opened them. A slow shake of the head.

  “Then.” Morlock reached down and grabbed the werewolf by the scruff of his hairy neck.

  “Morlock, no!” Deor screamed.

  When Liyurriu realized what Morlock was about, he slashed with his claws and snapped with his jaws, but Morlock easily avoided these dangers and tossed Liyurriu off the airship. The werewolf body fell, writhing like a snake but silent as a stone, into a bank of cloud and out of sight.

  Deor roared and grabbed for Morlock, as if he would send him by the same path. Morlock stepped back to his own bench and sat down.

  “Are you completely crazy?” shouted Deor, and Kelat, too, was looking at him as if he were a dangerous lunatic.

  “Kelat,” he said. “Harven Deor.”

  “Am I harven to a murderer?” Deor continued, hardly less loud than before. “What in the Canyon do you think you are doing? Which one of us will you throw out next?”

  “None of you,” Morlock said. “As for Liyurriu, he is not what he seems. He should never have been with us.”

  Deor glared at him for a while, saying nothing. Morlock met his gaze and said nothing more.

  Kelat finally broke the silence, saying, “What do you mean? Liyurriu was not a werewolf?”

  “Eh.”

  Deor unleashed a thunderblast of semicoherent Dwarvish profanity.

  Morlock ignored him and addressed himself to Kelat. “Your question does not have a yes or no answer. Liyurriu, as you may think of him, did not exist.”

  Kelat sat back and pondered this.

  “Do you mean he was a mere illusion?” Deor said in a more nearly reasonable voice. “Impossible, Morlock. He did work on this airship. He—” Deor’s voice choked off and he turned away.

  “His physical presence was real,” Morlock said, “but it was not inhabited by a mind. Not as your bodies are—as mine is.”

  “What do you mean?” Deor demanded. “What can that mean?”

  “His body was simply a sort of puppet, controlled by another mind far distant from here. A seer of great power.”

  “Who? Why?” Deor demanded.

  “That was what I wanted to know,” Morlock reminded him. “It is what Liyurriu would not say.”

  Kelat asked, “Did you see it in your vision? Is that how you know?”

  “Yes.” In his mind he could still see the tethers of talic force glimmering through the world, east and south. That was where the puppeteer of Liyurriu-puppet was.

  “Why didn’t Lady Ambrosia know it?”

  “She has long known it, I think.”

  “Then she must have had some purpose in concealing it. Shouldn’t you have . . . er . . . consulted with her?”

  Morlock reflected briefly and said, “No.”

  Kelat reflected briefly and then climbed into the now empty bench behind Deor.

  Morlock shrugged. It was no skin off his walrus. If it helped the boy sleep better, then it was all to the good. He wrapped himself in a cloak and courted sleep. It came quickly, and he was wrapped in a darkly golden dream where he lay beside his darkly golden wife, when his sleep was shattered by Deor’s voice.

  “Whazzit?” he said, or words to that effect.

  Deor was sitting in th
e bench Kelat had vacated, leaning over so that his head was near to Morlock’s.

  “Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.

  “Deortheorn,” Morlock replied.

  “Why did you give the knowledge of goldmaking to the Narkundans?”

  “Ah.” It was an unexpected question, but his harven-kin deserved a fair answer. He thought it over for a while and said, “I was angry at those smug pink parasites.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Those teachers who hated teaching, swarming around the stationer’s shop, talking about money as if it were virtue, arguing fine points of grammar while others were starving.”

  “Oh. Oh. I shall have to apologize to Ambrosia, I think.”

  “About what?”

  “We had an argument about something, and I’m beginning to see her point a little.”

  “She usually has one,” Morlock said.

  “Yes. Do you think Liyurriu is dead?”

  “The entity who was using Liyurriu is not dead. The body may or may not survive the fall.”

  “We’re miles in the air, Morlock.”

  “Werewolves drink strength and health from moonlight, it’s said, and Trumpeter is bright tonight. But there is no Liyurriu, Deor. That person does not exist.”

  “Eh,” said Deor pointedly, and climbed past the snoring Kelat to his own bench.

  Morlock shrugged, descended again into the depths of his cloak and sleep. His dreams this time were dark and cold, and Aloê showed herself in none of them.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Wreck of the Viviana

  They flew the blood-warm wind from the dying sun northward, day after day. At night they drifted. Sometimes they drove the propellers with the pedals and manuals to have something to do and to keep warm. Sometimes they talked, although infrequently. They watched the distant land and the bright ring of the horizon and they waited for the end—of their journey, of the world.

  They saw below them a great tidal wave of beasts fleeing from the bitter blue death that roamed the north. From their airship miles above they could see it, black, brown, and red against the pitiless white and silver of snow and ice.