by James Enge
“I'm never hungry,” Morlock admitted. “I eat because I know it's time.”
“And down here you never know what time it is. That's one reason I like it. It's also one reason I hate it.” Morlock sat straight up, and they handed him the bowl.
“I thought about killing you while you slept,” Ulugarriu said. “It would solve a lot of problems.”
“I'll be dead soon anyway. That should solve those problems.”
“And you don't care.”
“Everyone has to die sometime.”
“I don't. I mean, apparently, I don't.”
Morlock ate the porridge and waited for them to go on.
“I think I'm about six thousand years old,” Ulugarriu said. “I'm not sure, because every so often I go to sleep. And I sleep for a long time, and when I get up I'm a little younger than when I lay down. I age very slowly, so it seems to average out.”
Morlock nodded. “Then the city is your child.”
Ulugarriu winced. “Yes. Yes, I suppose so. I was never able to have children, thank you so much for reminding me. And, oh I don't know. After everyone I had ever known had died, I got sort of bored and I started trying different things. It was interesting. When I wasn't working on the crafts of lifemaking, I sort of did things with the city as a hobby. And the two pursuits merged, until the city became my greatest act of making.”
“You didn't make the mechanisms—the moon-clock, and the funicular, and so on.”
“No—nor the excellent sewer system. Different citizens came up with these ideas over the years, and I filed them away and eventually arranged for them to be implemented.”
“What happened to the citizens who came up with the ideas?”
“They would be dead by now anyway, Khretvarrgliu. I couldn't have people just randomly setting up lyceums of machine making and other ugly crafts. The city is mine, my long life's work. Do you understand?”
“Yes. But I don't agree. A city belongs to those who live there. And they belong to themselves.”
“Do it for them, then. Not for me, but for them.”
“Do what?”
“Help me fight the Strange Gods. Oh, they're not invulnerable; don't let them fool you. They hate Wuruyaaria because they need the Well of Shadows, and the city feeds on it.”
“Feeds on it? How?”
“Why do you think there are so many werewolves around here? They've been imbued with, what is it you call them, impulse clouds from the Well of Shadows. The Stone Tree was created to gather them and concentrate them in the Well. But since the growth of the city, well, there has been less to go around.”
“And the gods need them.”
“The Strange Gods do. They were once men and women, like you and your people. Long ago, they found a way to ascend to godhood, identifying their selves with abstract elements of human nature. Each one sacrificed himself—or herself—on the Apotheosis Wheel to a specific deity. And they became that deity. They have the powers that go with their spheres: Love or Cruelty or War or Death. But they need to be refreshed by shadows—by impulse clouds, as you say—to sustain the identification. Without that, their powers fade. They may even die. Wouldn't that be wonderful?”
Morlock was dying himself, and did not feel any measure of the other's enthusiasm. He shrugged and handed them the bowl. “Thanks for the porridge.”
“And now you'll be going?” Ulugarriu scowled at him. “You came here to kill me because I killed your friends. That robbed you of your purpose. I can give you another purpose. Will you hear me out?”
“I've been hearing you. I am done with purposes. I am nearly done with everything, I think.”
“Listen. Just listen. If you're dying, what's your hurry? You might as well die here with me. I doubt anyone in the world loves you as well as I do, and I'll feel that way even if I have to put the knife in you myself.”
“Eh.”
“Please, please don't say that. I never know what you mean by it. Never mind. Come and look at something with me.”
Ulugarriu stood, and he followed them out of the dimly lit sleeping chamber back into the bright workroom.
At one end of the room was a kind of bottle, about the size of a woman or a man. Both ends were twisted together. To Morlock's practiced eye the bottle looked as if it was made with glass interwoven with sunlight. He sensed a talic pressure also, even without summoning the rapture of vision.
Inside the bottle was a figure, misty and indefinite in form. Sometimes it looked like a woman, sometimes like a sword, sometimes like nothing Morlock could recognize.
“You see,” Ulugarriu said proudly. “I captured one. The one they call Justice. The power of justice is anywhere that people behave justly—which is why this is one of the weaker gods, I guess. But the Strange God named Justice has to manifest herself in a particular locus of space-time. They can be trapped by a crafty hunter with the right materials.”
“What is this made of?”
“Light. Glass. And heretical opinions: the Strange Gods are entities of the human domain, so human action can influence them.”
Morlock looked at Justice writhing, trapped behind glass.
He reached for his sword, but it was not on his back, of course. No matter: he could feel its nearness. He called out, “Tyrfing!” and held up his right hand. The sword flew glittering to his hand.
“Are you going to kill her?” Ulugarriu cried, surprised and delighted. “Khretvarrgliu, my stalwart. I knew you—Do it. Kill her. I've learned as much as I can from her. Then we can fight the rest of them together. Eh? Oh, say ‘Eh' to me for once in your life.”
Morlock, ignoring them, summoned the lowest level of vision. In the talic world, uniting spirit with matter, he was a pillar of black-and-white flames, and Tyrfing his focus of power showed the same talic pattern. Ulugarriu, in contrast, was a cloud of chaotic lights. Justice in her prison became more vivid and terrible, displaying the colors of a dying god. Her chains were the exact color of a thousand screaming voices.
Morlock swung the blade; it shattered the chains and the prison of glass and light.
Justice rose towering over them. One of her hands was gray, lacking talic force. Tyrfing had passed through it, and it seemed to have affected her somehow for the worse.
Morlock expressed regret: he had not meant to harm her.
Without answering, she moved to exact justice from her jailor.
Morlock stepped between the alien god and his enemy. He raised his sword, willing to do damage if Ulugarriu was harmed.
Justice, baffled, ceased to manifest herself. When Morlock was sure of this, he lowered his sword and dismissed his vision.
“—ghost-bitten god-licking brach-up of a bastard!” Ulugarriu was shrieking.
Morlock leaned on his sword like a staff. The effort had cost him much, too much. He felt his tunic settling from his left shoulder down to his side. His shoulder had become too insubstantial to hold the fabric up. And the area around his heart was numb, set for dissolution. In another day he would be dead, or a living ghost.
He snarled wordlessly at Ulugarriu, who seemed taken aback.
“At times I forget you're not a werewolf,” they said. “But that's because you're so much like a werewolf.”
He turned to leave.
“Wait!” Ulugarriu said. “Look at the visualization I've been simmering in my bowl of dreams. This will matter to you. I promise you it will.”
They led him down the long workroom to the broad-rimmed bowl of dreams, in its own wooden stand near the door where Morlock had first entered.
“Look!”
Morlock looked. He saw the insectlike instrument of the Strange Gods, sprawling across the northern plain. It was black lined with red fire. The land beyond it was brown and dead.
“What does it do?” Morlock asked.
“Ah! You are interested! I call it the Ice-Binder. It seems to eat cold.”
“Eh.”
“Oh, ghost. Not that again.”
“Cold is merely the absence of heat.”
“That's what I used to think, and I still think it. But apparently, heat can also be treated as the absence of cold.”
“Hm.”
“How I shall miss your lively conversation when you're gone!”
Morlock knew that two contradictory scholia might sometimes be used to explain and account for the same phenomena, and he even knew some math to describe such situations, but he was not interested in augmenting Ulugarriu's already considerable powers, so he said nothing.
“So this thing will gradually make this area unlivable, is that it?”
“Yes, except for the gradually part. I've been holding it off for years—using various dodges. It acts like it's alive, but it doesn't really seem to be. It certainly doesn't think. So I've used phantom cold waves and other tricks to slow its progress. But now it's about to sweep over the city.”
“How are we seeing this? This is not a vision.”
“You don't tell, but you ask, ask, ask. All right; I don't mind. The Strange Gods don't have anything like your Sight, either, but they do have what they call visualization. They gather information throughout their sphere and use it to create understanding of things as they are, or were, or will be. Their minds are not limited by physical constraints; they can use the whole world to think in, or remember. I can't, but I found that I can gather information through mantic spells to create images of things-as-they-may-be.”
“May be? Sounds uncertain.”
“That's what you get when you look at anything, youngster: something that may be there.”
Morlock tapped the rim of the bowl of dreams, sending ripples through the visualization. “This, itself, is interesting. But I still don't care what happens to Wuruyaaria.”
“No? Look there! A band of warriors, led by the new First Singer, has come north to investigate the Ice-Binder. They're trapped on the hill there. They're fighting so that some of them can get out.”
Morlock didn't even glance at the image. “They will die, or live. It makes no difference to me.”
“No?” Ulugarriu's russet eyebrows lifted in wonder. “Well, I made a promise to you earlier. I'm not withdrawing it—what was that?”
“You tell me.”
“They made some sort of hole in the Ice-Binder. Not enough to do any lasting harm, and now they're dead, as you say, but it's more than I've been able to do. If we could find out what they used—”
“I am dying, Ulugarriu. Even if I wanted to help you, I would be of no help to you.”
“Yes, but you need not die. I could—we could. That would be the first matter of business, you see. I would take your word you would help me. Then I, of course, could help you.”
“You can cure the ghost sickness.”
“Well. In a word. Yes.”
“Because you caused it.”
“Well, I. May have. Unintentionally.”
“What were your intentions?”
“To make you more pliable, of course. That was the whole purpose in getting you into the Vargulleion. That fathead Wurnafenglu said he could break anybody. But you wouldn't be broken. You wouldn't cooperate in any way. I admired you for that, still do, but it was inconvenient. The Strange Gods had sent you north on some mission that was disrupting all visualizations—even they were complaining about it, if you can believe it, self-centered brachs. I thought if I could get you working for me, you know, things might be fine after all.”
“You planted that spike in my head. And it was meant to do this. To do this to me.” He waved his ghostly hand in Ulugarriu's alarmed face.
“No! Really, I mean that. The spike was just a precautionary measure. I had no idea it would be in that long, or that it would make you suffer so. I was glad to take it out, so glad. But I couldn't have you—have you. Sort of running around with your full Sight, seeing through things and me and things. I just couldn't. So after I took the spike out I. Well, I did something else, didn't I? I let you have some of your Sight, and you weren't insane anymore, though you will never be what I would consider wholly sane either. The ghost. The ghost illness. Well, that wasn't meant to happen. I think I know why it's happening, and I can stop it. If you'll promise to help me.”
“Would Hlupnafenglu have gone the same way?”
“No. He had another problem. He couldn't stand his memories of being the Red Shadow. When I met him in Apetown he was going to kill himself. I experimented on him with the electrum spike. It did make him pliable and freed him from the burden of memories.”
“And made him an idiot.”
“A cheerful idiot is not to be despised, not by creatures like us, my friend. It was you who gave him his memories back. Without those, he might have been happy.”
“Did you kill him?”
“He killed himself.”
“That was how you made it look. You killed him.”
“I'll swear to you on binding oaths, I did not kill him. As Liudhleeo, I persuaded him to leave me alone for a time, and then I planted the headless Liudhleeo-simulacrum, stole Tyrfing, and fled. He must have killed himself after he found the body. He bore a heavy burden of guilt, you know.”
“No,” Morlock said bitterly. “No, I didn't know.”
He turned away.
Ulugarriu sighed. “Wait,” they said to his back. “Ambrosius, listen. The way down to the underworld is easy. The dark door lies open night and day. But to retrace your steps and escape again to the upper air—for that you'll work. For that you'll suffer.”
“Drop dead.”
“You're nearer that than I am, old friend.”
Morlock did not answer. His cloak and other gear were on the stool where he had first sat down to rest. He donned them, sheathed his sword, and walked out of Ulugarriu's house.
He passed swiftly through the asphodel fields, lest Ulugarriu try to talk to him through any of those masks, and was nearly running by the time he reached the shining bridge over the river of fire.
On the far side, the red unicorn had resumed its place at the bridgehead. Now it was pawing at something on the ground. Morlock could hardly see it in the glare from the bridge's light, but as he came closer he thought it was the dark splintered remains of the cold-light he had thrown away earlier.
He felt through the pockets in his cloak and shirt to see how many cold-lights he had left. The unicorn looked up and saw him on the bridge. It casually moved aside to let him pass: apparently it only guarded against people trying to enter—if, in fact, that was what it had been doing before. Perhaps it had only wanted to destroy the hated light, and now it had.
Morlock sidled past the uninterested unicorn. He had a thought on how to get that horn.
Morlock found an upright stone a little under his height. He draped his cloak over the stone. Standing behind the stone and resting his head atop it, he inched his arm under the cloak and pulled a cold-light from one of its pockets. Holding it behind the cloak, he tapped it lightly against the stone to activate it.
At the sound, faint even to Morlock, the red unicorn became completely alert. It stared straight at Morlock with its slotted red eyes.
Morlock shifted his stance a little and pushed the light out from beyond the cloak.
The unicorn lowered its horn and charged, in a single silken motion. Through each odd writhing gallop, neither like a horse nor a goat, the long spiraling horn was aimed straight at the same point; it never wavered.
The impact of the unicorn shook the stone. The horn was buried deep in the rock, about where Morlock's heart would be, if the stone had been his torso.
And it was stuck. The unicorn planted its delicate cloven hooves and pushed against the rocky ground, but it could get very little purchase.
Morlock pocketed the cold-light as the unicorn watched him with frenzied gaping red eyes. He drew Tyrfing from the baldric over his decaying shoulder.
“I'm sorry, Swift One,” Morlock said. “Need drives me.” He struck at the base of the horn and cut it cleanly through, about
a thumb's width above the brow.
The docked unicorn leapt back and stared bemusedly at Morlock. It looked at the stump of its horn sticking out of the stone and stepped back farther.
“I hope it will grow back,” said Morlock, not supposing the unicorn understood him, or would care if it could. Resting Tyrfing against the stone's side, he drew the cold-light and tossed it as far and as fast as he could.
The unhorned unicorn followed the arc of the light with delighted angry eyes and immediately ran after it. Morlock had actually thrown it harder than he intended: the cold-light landed in the river of molten stone. The unicorn dove in after it and disappeared from sight. Presently it appeared again, spraying fire from its nose and mouth. When Morlock turned away, it was still diving about like a porpoise in the fiery river.
Morlock picked up Tyrfing and began to hew away at the top of the stone. If he could have used two hands, he would have. But eventually he had split the top of the stone and was holding the red horn of the unicorn in his hand. He tucked it away in his cloak and walked away from the river of fire.
He came to the place where he felt the impulse clouds swirling through the air like leaves in autumn. He lay down among the stones and the corpses and, holding tightly to Tyrfing as his focus, summoned the rapture of vision.
It did not come easily, but he was in no hurry this time. He focused and unfocused. He thought and he dreamed. He unwove his consciousness and in its place spun a vision as deep as his wounded powers could permit.
When he was deep in rapture, he began to draw impulse clouds to him. They flocked to him like birds to scattered grain, eager to be directed by a living will. When he was densely cocooned with the shadowy clouds, he directed them to lift him upward.
As he rose through the cone of the dead volcano, he saw much with his inward eye that had been hidden before. He saw a network of underground channels like dark rivers, leeching impulse clouds from the Well of Shadows. He saw the unlife of the fiery beast to the north and the thousand winters it carried in its cold veins. He saw the colonies of were-rats up and down the slopes of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. More were dead than alive: the cruel weather had been deadly for them, too.