The Wide World's End

by James Enge

  North of the great migration, there were still shapes moving in the wild, wind-carved wastes of snow, but they could not quite see them or understand what they saw.

  And there was a long, straight line running ahead of them, all the way to the northern horizon. When they talked, they talked a little about that.

  “You know what it is,” Ambrosia said eventually. (Morlock was in trance, keeping the Viviana aloft.)

  “I do not know what it is,” Deor replied emphatically.

  “It’s the weight of the sun’s death. It’s the footprint in the snow of the warm air we’re riding north.”

  “Ah,” said Deor and Kelat in chorus and with equal satisfaction.

  The Ambrosii grew hollow-eyed. It was hard to spend much of a day in visionary rapture, day after day. It made the soul’s relationship to the body more tenuous. If the bond finally broke, that was death. They were not about to die. But they were not well either.

  One day, around noon, Deor said, “We’re lower than we were. Are the gasbags getting cold?”

  Morlock looked up into the body of the airship. The glass furnace was still burning its fuel. He looked back at Ambrosia. Though deep in vision, she looked at him with eyes closed, the dim glow of her irises visible through the lids. She shook her head. And the ship still seemed to be buoyant.

  “Unlikely,” Morlock said. He glanced all the way around the horizon and added, “Look north.”

  “The sky seems . . . bigger there,” Deor called back. “Or the land higher.”

  “The sunstream is dropping down—carrying us closer to the Soul Bridge?” Kelat asked.

  “Likely,” Morlock said.

  He wondered if the very sky curved down at the edge of the world, closing in the world’s air like a glass bowl enclosing water. The idea gave him a breathless, locked-in feeling that he disliked strongly. He said nothing of this, however.

  As Viviana flew lower, they could see the wild beasts of the snow fields better. But it was hard to understand what they saw. Many shapes were white-on-white, their borders hard to distinguish. Others glittered like glass in the bitter, pale sun.

  “Are those plants?” wondered Kelat, as they flew past a dense, tangled chaos of bitterly bright ice things.

  “Of course!” Deor said. And Morlock agreed: it was very like a forest seen from above, except that it was a forest after an ice storm, with no green or brown to be seen. There were skeletal shapes of black, though—very like thin tree trunks and bare, wintry branches.

  “What kind of creatures would feed on such plants?” Kelat wondered.

  “Ice-bunnies?” speculated Deor. “Frost-deer?”

  “And who feeds on the ice-bunnies?”

  “Us, maybe. A nice frost-bunny stew sounds good right about now, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Morlock noticed that the glittering plants did not grow near the narrow road leading into the deep north. Nor did the hulking white shapes tend to travel there.

  “What’s that?” Deor called back, pointing to the east. “Quake sign?”

  Morlock looked at a long, serpentine break in the snow crust. “Hope so,” he called back. But he didn’t think so. Fault lines from an earthquake would have been more angular.

  Later, when Morlock was in trance, keeping the Viviana aloft, Deor made some reference to “throwing more of us off the airship.”

  Ambrosia, who had stepped past Morlock to talk to the other males, said, “You’re still angry with Morlock about Liyurriu?”

  Deor was taken aback. After a moment he answered, “Yes.”

  “You realize there is no Liyurriu? He was simply a fraud, sent to beguile us?”

  Deor said slowly, “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. It stood out like Chariot in a cloudless winter sky when you looked at him in the talic realm.”

  Deor lowered his head. He was remembering the werewolf sewing beside him—holding his arms when he was hanging outside the gondola. It had felt as if there was someone behind those moonslit eyes. “Why didn’t you notice it, then?” Deor asked. He could hear the anger in his own voice, but he couldn’t keep it out.

  “Of course I noticed it. I suspected it when we met, and confirmed it that first night, when I stood watch while you were all sleeping.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I thought Liyurriu might be useful. Even an enemy can be useful, if you know him for what he is. And it was not clear that Liyurriu (or his puppeteer, rather) was an enemy.”

  “Then Morlock was wrong.”

  “I didn’t say so. He doesn’t trust people who lie to him; it’s a fool who does. Liyurriu could have been sent by someone who wants the world to end, to wait until we were vulnerable, then turn on us and kill us.”

  “Who would want that?”

  “The people Morlock calls the Sunkillers.”

  “Surely there are none in our world? That’s why we are going to find theirs.”

  “It’s not sure at all, Deortheorn, if I may call you so.”

  “Harven.”

  “There was one in the world, our world. I’m pretty sure there was. The Balancer, the unbeing that lived in the Waste Lands. Did Aloê ever tell you about it?”

  “I heard something about it,” Deor admitted.

  “It had a relationship with the Two Powers. It was to keep them working, engaged in the destruction of the world. It was some plot of the Sunkillers, who lived in our world before the sun was born, and ached to return. That plot failed; this is another attempt, it would seem.”

  Deor thought long about this. “So you think Liyurriu was sent by them, or one of them—by the Sunkillers?”

  “No, I don’t. I doubt one of them would trouble to learn the night speech of werewolves, for instance. But what if I were wrong? I was willing to take the risk; Morlock wasn’t. A difference of opinion.”

  “And of method.”

  “Because he acted arrogantly and alone, without saying a word to anyone? So did I, you know. And he gave Liyurriu, or whoever was pulling Liyurriu’s strings, a chance to speak up. Whoever they are, they should not have tried to bandy words with Morlock Ambrosius.”

  There was an implied rebuke there, Deor decided. If the stranger behind the Liyurriu-mask should have not bandied words with Morlock, still less should his harven-kin, perhaps. And, if he was going to do it, he might as well do it to his kinsman’s face.

  He turned away from Ambrosia and his own thoughts and looked off Viviana’s left bow . . . “port” they’d say on a sea ship, although he never understood why.

  There was a glittering ice-forest there, running west as far as Deor could see. They were flying low enough now that he could see things moving among the crystalline leaves. Icy birds? Perhaps. He couldn’t quite catch their shapes.

  Ambrosia and Kelat continued to talk in low tones behind him. They were not saying much, but the way they were saying it made him wonder if they would be mating soon. He hoped they wouldn’t do it in the Viviana. He never enjoyed witnessing the mating of the Other Ilk—it was so violent, so hard to distinguish from an act of hate.

  In the event, he found that he need not have worried. The Viviana had not long to live.

  The first sign came that night.

  Morlock was awake; Ambrosia was in trance. Deor had thought and thought and thought about what she had said to him earlier. So he nerved himself to stand up on his bench.

  The moonslit snows below were bright as a skull’s teeth, ready to devour him if he fell.

  He sneered at them and gently stepped onto the bench where Kelat was snoring. The boy didn’t waken.

  Ambrosia was still sitting on the bench behind Kelat. Her closed eyes glowed eerily in trance. Even more eerily: she raised her right hand in greeting as he passed. Morlock couldn’t do that in rapture. If Noreê or Illion or any of the great seers of the Wardlands could do it, Deor had never seen it. But it was effortless for Ambrosia. He raised his own in reply.

/>   “Excuse me,” he said gruffly, as he stepped past Morlock’s bench, and then he seated himself on the vacant bench behind Morlock.

  Morlock was enjoying some dry bread, salted meat, and a mold-speckled slab of pale, crumbly cheese. He held his hands out to Deor, silently offering to share.

  Deor took a piece off the moldy end of the cheese. They sat there, chewing and not talking. Deor enjoyed a good talk, but he had grown up among seven clans of dwarves whose notions of conversation more nearly approximated Morlock’s. And it was easeful to sit there, not saying anything because nothing needed to be said.

  Then: something needed to be said.

  Chariot shone brightly over the western horizon, and Horseman stood high overhead, eclipsed by Viviana’s bulk but adding its light to the world. Except for color, it was nearly as bright as day . . . and in this northern icescape there was little color to be seen.

  So Deor saw quite clearly when a cloud of the fluttering things left the ice-forests below and arrowed toward low-flying Viviana.

  “Morlock!” Deor shouted, and pointed.

  Morlock looked, saw, stood. “Rouse Kelat and my sister, if you can.” He ran forward recklessly, drawing his sword as he went. He stood on the prow of the gondola, his sword, bright with reflected moonslight, in his right hand; his left hand grasped the rigging.

  Deor followed with more cautious speed. His shout woke the already twitching Kelat. Deor turned to look at Ambrosia, wondering what to do. He feared to touch her, lest he be drawn into her vision. Also, he had to admit to himself, he simply feared to touch her.

  She raised both her hands now. He took that to mean, Stop. I know what I’m doing. He didn’t doubt it. The Ambrosii always knew what they were doing. But they didn’t seem to ever know what the other was doing.

  Deor turned to look outboard of Viviana’s gondola.

  The flying things were nearer now, the nearest ones enough to see. They weren’t like birds—more like insects. They had great membranous wings that flapped so swiftly that they seemed to glow in the moonslight. Heads with many eyes, glittering like polished diamonds, turned on their narrow necks jerkily, as if moved by ill-made gears. Their long, curving bodies were filled with some dark sloshing fluid, clearly visible through the transparent chitinous plates they had for skin. They kept their long, spiny legs folded up over their great bellies, like self-satisfied club men after a good dinner. At the end of each broad tail was a long, glittering sting.

  The foremost was heading straight for Morlock. Of course it was.

  Deor watched, motionless, as the crystal beast arrowed in, swinging the fat weight of its body to direct the sting at Morlock. Then the dark fluid in its center seemed to boil, and a jet of it came out of the sting as it drove it to strike.

  Morlock dodged the sting and its venom, if that’s what it was.

  The dark fluid fell among the ropes. The ropes stiffened and shattered like glass.

  Morlock slashed with Tyrfing and shattered the icy wing of the beast.

  It tumbled away in the night, silent, strangely like Liyurriu, striking a few of its fellows and taking them with it as it went, but there were more, so many more.

  Then all of Deor’s ancestors roared in his ears. He was a Theorn of Theorn clan, and his harven-kin was fighting for his life—for all their lives. So what if it was futile? So what if they all died? No dwarf lives forever.

  He seized his axe and flourished it. “Ath, rokhlan!”

  “Ath! Ath!” Morlock replied. He waved his sword at the moon in the west. “Khai, gradara!”

  Deor leaped forward to stand beside Morlock on the prow, now swinging a little because of the shattered ropes.

  Ambrosia spoke. “Ware impulse!” her toneless, entranced voice said.

  Morlock and Deor had time to look at each other when the airship lurched forward.

  They tumbled together back onto the empty bench at the front of the gondola.

  There was a humming in the night: the Viviana’s propellers were spinning. Ambrosia was releasing the pent up energy of the impulse wells.

  The cloud of icy insects was left behind, glittering in Viviana’s airy wake.

  Deor, looking back, shook his free hand at them and shouted derisively.

  Morlock tapped his shoulder and pointed ahead.

  Another cloud of icy insects was rising to approach their prow.

  “Gleh,” said Deor.

  “Yes,” said Morlock. He jumped up on the bench and swarmed up a surviving rope using his feet and his left hand. As Deor watched, open-mouthed and uncomprehending, he swung Tyrfing with deadly force, shattering the keel of the airship and severing its fabric envelope. He climbed up onto the broken keel and slashed again and again. He shattered the glass furnace, scattering its long-burning maijarra coals among the ulken-cloth gasbags and the gondola. Gasbags were drifting away in the dark air.

  “Deor! Kelat!” he called down. “Come on!”

  Someone using Deor’s voice said, in a remarkably cool tone, “Come on and do what exactly, harven?”

  “Grab a gasbag and ride it down to the ground.”

  Of course. Of course. Deor looked about him sourly. Ambrosia was already swarming up the ropes. Kelat saw this and immediately followed suit.

  The gondola was burning. The gasbags in the Viviana’s heart were afire. Ice-spewing crystal insects the color of moonslight were closing in on them from all sides. This was not the time to calmly discuss alternatives. If they had been just a little lower, Deor would have jumped, and to Canyon with the gasbags and Morlock’s kindly meant suggestion. But they were still high enough to kill a falling dwarf. Deor thrust the axe handle into his belt and climbed up the ropes. He grabbed the first gasbag he came across. (Was it a good one? How could he tell?) He kicked off from the Viviana and drifted away into the moonslit void.

  He was the first away. Morlock was still busy hacking away at the airship’s shell. Ambrosia and Kelat were quarrelling about something. Irritably, Ambrosia seized a gasbag and drifted away from the dying airship. Kelat followed, gripping the seam of a gasbag with one hand, his sword with the other. Morlock at last grabbed a gasbag and kicked off.

  The Viviana was now heeling badly, lit with internal fire in the bitter, night-blue air. Burning balloons were leaking from her wounded belly. The clouds of ice insects met her in midair and attacked.

  Then, and only then, did Deor understand what Morlock had done. Abandoning the airship and scattering burning globes through the night air gave some cover for their escape.

  Away from the glass furnace and the kindly tending of the seers, the bitter night air cooled Deor’s gasbag quickly. His descent became something more like a fall. Soon he let go of the balloon and tossed his axe well away from him so that he would not disembowel himself on impact. The bone-white ground leapt up at him, and he committed himself to the care of his ancestors.

  The surface was so soft that he didn’t even feel his boots strike it. He passed from a world of moonslight to a world of darkness in an instant. He ground to a halt, not because his boots had struck earth at last; his fall simply seemed to have compacted a little island in the snow.

  Deor took a cautious breath. There was little air to breathe: the snow had collapsed around him and he was quite thoroughly buried, perhaps to a depth that was twice his height, perhaps more—certainly not less.

  But now he knew what he was doing. He started making a way for himself with his hands and feet, compressing snow, making a kind of slope to crawl out of the hole. It took time, but he wasn’t worried. It was no worse than travelling over the glaciers of Mundjokull, though perhaps a little colder. A lot colder. No matter: he knew what to do and he did it. On the way up he came across his axe. It made him heavier, but he was glad to see it.

  He broke back to the surface at last, after many a recollapse of the snow around him. The wind-carved crust of snow was very tenuous, but it could hold him if he stretched out his weight carefully.

  He saw three oth
er snowholes with floundering figures in them: his comrades.

  Beyond them all, encircled by glittering clouds of ice-bugs, the Viviana fell from the night-blue sky. Horseman, rising in the west, lit her with fierce light; beyond her in the eastern sky, Trumpeter seemed to watch somberly. Her front section completely empty of balloons, the rear section in flames, she dropped prow first toward the snowy fields and crashed, the remains of her wooden framework and gondola screaming on impact before silence fell, even the fires silent, quenched by the bitter, moonblue snow.

  Deor watched it all through a haze of tears. He had hated the journey on the Viviana more than any other he had ever taken. But she was the work of their hands and minds, fearfully and cunningly made with great labor, and she had died protecting them. He wiped the tears away and snarled at himself for a fool. But he did not look away until the fires were gone and the ice insects had flown off again.

  Deor crawled across the surface crust to where Morlock and Ambrosia were arising from their own impact craters, crooked shadows in the moonslit snow.

  “What now, Ambrosii?” he called.

  “The wreck of the Viviana,” said the shadow with Morlock’s voice.

  Of course. Their packs, if they could recover them.

  “And maybe we can salvage some of her for snowshoes,” he said, thinking aloud.

  “A good thought,” Morlock said.

  Deor looked at the ruins of the Viviana, half sunk in snowdrifts.

  “She was a brave ship,” he said, and—Canyon keep it!—his voice broke in mid-sentence.

  The shadow that was Ambrosia turned to look at him. “Yes,” she said. “I should have known better than to name her after a woman so mortal and so crazy. But maybe that’s why she was so brave.”

  “Could be,” said Deor with Morlockian gruffness, and crawled off to help Kelat out of his snow pit.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Narrow Road

  to the Deep North

  Their packs survived more or less intact. Morlock and Ambrosia had placed fire-quell magic on them, as they did out of habit with most things they wore, and the only losses were from the crash. In Morlock’s, for instance, the impact had shattered a jar of some horrible mushroom liquor he had received as a gift from the Blackthorn masters of making.