by James Enge
He feared for her danger as he did not for his own, but he felt a strange warmth also. He had faced death so many times, almost always alone. He could not share his life with her, but he could share this—this moment of danger, even death.
“Thanks,” he said presently.
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied curtly, which he took as a refusal. “Do you think you can hit him with that next time?”
“Doubt it. You should get out of here.”
“Fuck yourself.”
After a few moments’ consideration, Morlock took that for a refusal also. He felt a real chill then, as of approaching death.
Or was that what it was?
“Is the breeze cooler?” he asked.
“Hard to say,” she said, rolling her eyes at him. “I’ve been underwater for a while. But . . . you know, at least there is a breeze now.”
He turned away from her, an odd idea growing in his head. If the weather was breaking . . . if the clouds had grown tall enough to press against the vault of the sky . . . then some aether would seep through.
Then lightning would fall. It would fall . . .
He snapped the chain around his neck with three fingers and bound his focus, the bane-jewel that Rulgân had coveted, to the shaft of the spear.
“Is that smart?” Aloê asked. “You’ll probably lose both.”
“I expect to,” Morlock said.
Rulgân was dropping down into another attack run. Morlock held the spear up as high as he could, knowing the dragon could see it, baiting him with it as the dragon had baited Morlock with his own life, waiting for the enemy’s approach. . . .
When the dragon was still well in front of him, Morlock threw back his body and hurled the spear—and its cargo of gem—straight into the sky.
Rulgân could not resist. He did not resist. He plucked the spear out of the air like a hawk taking a sparrow and flew westward with it.
Morlock saw a flicker of light, silver among the leaden clouds.
“I’m going to go deep into the rapture of vision,” he said, turning to Aloê.
“Why?”
Morlock glanced at the sky, measured the dragon’s course.
“No time to explain,” he said. “If you won’t go—”
“I won’t.”
“—I guess you could hold me up. I don’t want him to think I’m cowering in front of him.”
“You seem to value his opinion very much.”
Morlock wondered if that were true, then shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He planted his feet as firmly as he could in the bilge, closed his eyes, and summoned the dream of ur-shapes that always enfolded him.
Aloê had studied the arts of Sight with Noreê and the sages of New Moorhope, but she had never seen anyone scale the heights of visionary rapture as swiftly as Morlock did. Maybe he was always a little bit in the visionary realm. That might account for his lack of conversation, now that she thought of it: it was notoriously difficult to use words while in rapture.
She was prepared to do as he asked and hold him up, but it seemed unnecessary: his body was relaxed, but somehow did not fall, or even slump over. His irises glowed slightly, shining through the thin skin of his eyelids: that was not uncommon in deep vision.
The clouds seemed darker, the breeze distinctly colder and stronger. Was Morlock able to master the winds? Could he strike at the dragon with them, protect them somehow?
It seemed unlikely, and now the enemy was even nearer. She saw the beast still greedily clutching the spear and the gem bound to it.
Now was the time to dive for safety, if ever. She shook the thought loose with a shudder of disgust: she hadn’t come here for that. She calculated, as coldly as she could, the chances of catching hold of the dragon’s foreleg and wresting the spear from its claws. She might at least manage to do some damage to the beast before it killed her. . . .
Morlock’s slack form lifted up from the little boat, drifting in the air. His back bent like an ill-made bow. His arms lifted out from his body, his fingers spread wide.
In all the world there was only the sound of the onrushing dragon’s wings. The breeze had stopped, as if the sky were holding its breath.
Then the sky spoke: two bright bitter words. Lightning flared, from east to west, from north to south, long ragged shrieks of light that crossed in the sky just where the dragon flew.
Morlock’s body fell down into the boat, sprawling over the side like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
The dragon’s body tumbled in the sky overhead, wrapped in flame and smoke, its eyes lifeless and dark as coals, its right foreleg burning bright silver where lightning had melted the spear.
The dragon struck the water just beyond their boat. The wave capsized the little craft, and the world became a chaos of water, fog, and smoke. Aloê managed to grab Morlock’s body as it bobbed next to the overturned boat and dragged it away toward the shore.
He came out of his trance halfway there. His eyes went dark, then opened; his mouth gasped and filled with water; he began to sink, floundering in the water.
“Can’t you swim?” she shouted.
He snarled something—she thought maybe it was Dwarvish—and began something like swimming. It reminded her of a time when one of her cousins had tossed a cat from a boat. The little beast had crawled desperately through the water toward land—not about to give the water the satisfaction of killing it.
Eventually they crawled up onto the sharp rocks of the Kaenish coast.
Aloê liked a stony beach, but she immediately hated this one. She had hardly taken a step on it when her feet were pierced by the evil edges of the dark rocks littered everywhere.
She turned to make a remark to her companion, saw that Morlock was snorting out water from his nose, and turned away to contemplate the dragon drifting motionless, flameless, steam-wreathed, half-sunk in the shallow waters. She turned back to the man who had struck it from the sky with lightning, and watched in some dismay as he blew snot and saltwater from his nose into his red cloak of office.
“I suppose we can wash it,” she said pointedly.
“Bury it,” he said. “A little way inland. No one wears a red cloak in Kaen.”
“Why not?”
“Because we wear them.”
Aloê nodded, remembering. They hunted Guardians like unicorns in Kaen, it was said.
Morlock looked at last out to sea, at the drifting form of his fallen enemy. “Wonder if he’s dead.”
“Can you do the thing with the lightning again?”
“Not without a focus. Also, lightning doesn’t like to fall in the same place twice.”
“Then we’ll want to be a long way away from here when he wakes up. If he does.”
They turned and walked northward, into the rough red lands of Kaen. By then the rain had begun to fall steadily, and more thunder shouted behind them over the long gray waves.
Koijal awoke from dreams of lightning to a day shrouded in fog.
“It’s like we slipped through the gate in the west,” he remarked to his second-in-command, a dour Eastholder named Stellben. “Like we’re sailing off-course through the Sea of Worlds.”
“That’s water under our keel,” said Stellben, who understood the wind and waves of the world-ocean as well as any woman alive, but whose grasp of simile and metaphor was less masterful. “We’re not so far out from Sandport,” she added. “Passed by the Iljhut Rocks around dawn.”
“Home today, you think, then?”
“Tonight at the latest. Is that,” asked his literal-minded navigator, “a god on the foredeck?”
Koijal looked at the foredeck: a black-on-white presence was standing there—and a white-on-black entity that was somehow the same but opposite.
“Two,” he said, and issued his last order as commander of the Flayer. “Abandon ship.”
Stellben looked wonderingly at him rather than passing along the order, and then the stillness came upon them.
When Koijal
saw the oar-thains grow still, saw the sudden stiffness in Stellben’s face, felt the weight on his own limbs, he had one moment left to speak. He wanted to express his frustration and anger for almost returning home, his shame and his grief for the crew of his first command, his fury at the forces that were killing him. He got as far as, “Why—?” and then the stillness fell on his throat and lungs.
“No word will pass from this ship to the Graith.”
“My decree from before time forbids it.”
“My silence, stretching back from after time’s end, has swallowed it.”
“Natural law, the conflict of our wills, informs us—”
“The meaningless pattern of meanings that means whatever I will—”
“The Graith stands as a wall between Time and Time’s end.”
“The Graith has been infected with my Chaos.”
“It has been wounded by my ceaseless sword of Fate.”
“The infection must spread.”
“Liar. It’s a wound, not an infection. The wound must bleed the lies of Chaos away.”
“You’re the liar. But the Graith must not know any truths that will heal your lies, lest they also cure the infection of my empty truth.”
“No, it’s the other way around.”
As the gods bickered, the fog surrounding the trireme thickened and brightened. It worked its way into the oars and the hull, splitting them into fragments, and the fragments into fragments.
Now Flayer was gone; Koijal and his crew were now adrift in the dense dissolving mist. It wormed its way into them, dividing them into segments of themselves, and the segments into segments, until there was nothing left that could feel pain anymore and death was a convenient door to shut against the snarling of the gods.
You’ve set out on a long journey. And it’s expected that
you’ll slip, and bump into something, and fall, and get
tired, and shout, “I wish I were dead!”—in other words,
you’ll lie. You’ll pick up a companion in one place, bury
him in another, and you’ll know fear in still another.
These sufferings are the milestones on this broken road.
—Seneca, Letters
The rain fell hard but didn’t last long. The rocky hollows of the bitter shore soon ran over with brackish, barely drinkable water that they drank without hesitation. It was a relief to have the salt water rinsed from her skin and her tunic. Aloê would have liked to skin off her underwear and rinse it out, but somehow was reluctant to do so in Morlock’s presence. The charm around her neck seemed to have come through seawater and rain without harm, so she did not fiddle with it. She didn’t want to do that in Morlock’s presence either.
She had to admit that, if Morlock was more or less useless at sea, he was a capable companion on land. When he noticed that Aloê was tracking blood behind her—the sharp rocks of the shoreline had pierced her feet—he had her sit down and made a pair of sandals for her, using knotted cloth torn from his own clothing and the thin tough-stemmed grasses that were the only thing growing this near the coast.
She set about bandaging her wounds herself: her companion was no medic, or so she guessed from the ugly scars on his neck and elsewhere. But she gratefully put on the footgear Morlock had conjured up out of nothing.
“Thanks!” she said, and might have said more, but he just shrugged and opened his hands. Either he thought it no great matter, or her gratitude was not important to him. She found him an odd man, hard to read.
There were chew-marks on some of the grasses nearby. From the size and shape of the toothmarks she guessed there was some sort of rabbit. She followed a trail of chewed grass until she found a couple of plump furry creatures gnawing on the tough grassy stalks.
She crept close to them before they noticed her. One of them looked up in alarm, unfolded two long hairless legs, like a crane, and ran swiftly away through the grass.
The other was a tad slower. She knocked it over and broke its neck.
“Sorry, fellow,” she said to the dead beast. “But we can’t live on grass.”
She brought it back to Morlock.
“What is it?” he said, looking curiously at the odd carcass.
“Supper. Let’s walk until we find some brush and make camp. We need to talk”—she stressed the word gently but firmly—“about our next move.”
He nodded in agreement, apparently saving up words for later.
They came fairly soon to a stand of trees with peach-colored leaves and black flowers. Morlock took some of the deadwood, leaves, and a stone (the ground was still very rocky) and somehow made a fire, in spite of the fact that everything was still damp from the recent rain. Aloê skinned and split up the two-legged bunny with a sharp rock, spitted the meat on a few sticks, and roasted it.
She was worried that Morlock would be squeamish about eating the meat. In her months in the north, she had never so much as seen fresh meat, and she had come to wonder if dwarves ever ate anything except hideous dry sausage-cakes and flatbread. But whether they did or not, Morlock ate his share of the meal without flinching. In fact, he spent much of the meal fiddling with bones from the extendable legs of the dead creature, which Aloê found a bit morbid.
“What next, do you think?” she said, when they had washed down the last of their meal with a refreshing draft of muddy water from a rocky hole.
“Nearest town.” Morlock was rubbing the bones with hot sand from the base of the fire. “How’s your Kaenish?”
“Jhüsh fnöja wäkkleh,” she replied, which meant roughly I speak it better than you do.
It was mere boasting (she had learned the tongue in deep trance only a couple of days ago), but he nodded solemnly. “Yes, I think you do. I can’t make vowels sound like that.”
“You could, but you won’t.”
He shrugged.
“You’ve been to Kaen before, though? You were here last summer?”
He nodded.
“Was it this bad?”
Morlock winced. “Worse,” he said, but did not explain. She remembered the scars (on his feet and neck) and didn’t ask more about that. They had more pressing issues.
“You’re a font of information, Vocate,” she said wryly. “So, what do you think? Do you remember the map of Kaen well enough to find the nearest town?”
He shook his head. “Let’s walk that way.” He gestured with his left hand, seeming to indicate a line parallel with the shore.
“But there won’t be any cities on the coast, right?” she said. “Kaenish religion forbids it.”
He nodded. “But rivers run down to the sea.”
“And people build cities by rivers,” she said. “Right. We’ll walk near the coast until we find some running water and then follow it upstream. Is that what you suggest?”
He nodded again and took off his shoes. He undid something, some leather-stringy knotty thing, and the soles fell apart. Inside there were a few thin, clipped silver coins. He handed them to her.
“Kaenish issue,” he said.
It was enough to live on for a while—longer, if they could live off the land. She’d have asked Morlock about it, but he probably only would have grunted or made some odd gesture with his hands.
His hands, in fact, were a lot more eloquent than the rest of him put together. As she watched, he refastened the soles of his shoes and stood, slipping the bones into an odd pocket in the side of his shirt.
Aloê was puzzled by that. She had heard that dwarves were acquisitive (although she hadn’t noticed that in dwarves she actually knew, like Deor). Maybe Morlock had picked up some of their habits? It’s true they didn’t have much in the way of possessions; the bones were not nothing. In the same spirit she held onto the stone she had skinned the creature with, although she had no pocket to put it in. And her other hand held their meager store of silver coins, which Morlock had carelessly handed her. (So much for dwarvish greed.)
Without her having to say anything, he noticed t
hat her hands were full and ripped another strip from his shirt. He worked it with his fingers a bit and then handed it to her. She took it, as wordless as he, and knotted the coins and the stone into it one by one, so that they wouldn’t jingle. Then she wrapped the makeshift money belt around her left arm.
If Morlock on dry land was a more capable entity than Morlock at sea, Morlock in the unguarded lands was a rather more sinister presence than Morlock in A Thousand Towers. Without his vocate’s cloak his shoulders seemed even crookeder. And he watched the track and the land on either side of it constantly, as if it were a sleeping animal that might wake up and bite him.
Well. He had been here before, and it had bitten him. Aloê tried to look at it the same way.
It was on odd-looking place, certainly. Plants were scarce thereabouts, and green ones a rarity: even the weeds had an odd peachy color that blended in with the rusty sand and red protruding stones.
They came to a small river that was undrinkably filthy. Aloê wouldn’t have wanted to cross it even in a boat. She met Morlock’s cool eyes and nodded with satisfaction: there was a city upstream.
They turned right and began to walk along the bank of the river. Now they were following something that might charitably be described as a dirt road. Others had passed this way, fairly often. She found that cheering, although she noticed that Morlock did not.
The land by the river was more farmable, and soon they came on an actual farm. The fields were enclosed by fences, and the fences were adorned with many a protective idol whose protruding teeth and claws and phalluses obviously threatened anyone thinking of an intrusion.
The air was smoky, and as they rounded a hill, they saw why. In an open field was a great fire, and the farmers were dancing around it, throwing things on the flames.
“Are those people burning food?” Aloê asked Morlock.
He shrugged unhappily and walked on without looking back. “Possibly. Mostly trash, I guess. But it is a tenet of Kaenish religion to burn part of every crop.”
“Why?”
“The religion began in an age of many famines. That’s what the books say. Only the strong and cruel could survive. So now they say they must stay hungry, so that they can stay cruel. Prosperity leads to weakness. So they destroy wealth.”