by James Enge
“We might be able to craft a suitable ur-shape in a higher dimension,” he said to Ambrosia, and Aloê’s face fell a little.
“Uh. Yeah. Run the demon around and around on a narrow little path until he’s back where he started before he started. I like it!”
“I wish we had some lightning, though.”
“Right! Put the demon straight out of our misery! But I wouldn’t bet on any good thunderstorms until spring around here.”
Morlock nodded, and began to think about ur-shapes that might meet their particular needs.
“I’ll tend to Merlin,” Aloê said resignedly, “while you two work it out.”
“Merlin,” said Ambrosia. “Gah.”
In the end they superheated the forge by redirecting its heat back toward it. Morlock placed Armageddon, still containing the demon, into the hottest part. Then, as Ambrosia contained the demon by walking around the forge and singing his name at the pitch of most pain, Morlock went into deep vision and imposed new sets of lattices in the molten glass, folding and refolding it as it became denser and darker, swallowing the forge’s heat along with most of Armageddon’s matter, until there was only a single cold piece of glasslike metal in the heart of the frost-covered forge.
“That,” Ambrosia said, tentatively tapping the piece of singing metal, “is stable. Old Andhrakar’s not going anywhere!”
Her face was slick with sweat. Morlock, arising from his trance, pounded her higher shoulder. “That was good work,” he said.
“You too,” said the girl. “You too. Boy, I don’t want to ever have to do something like that again!”
She picked up the piece of metal binding the demon, and it began to sing in exquisite hungry pain. “Wow,” she said. “This thing really wants to kill someone.”
“We should bury it, or something.”
“Or something. The crypt!”
“What crypt?”
“Our father’s plan to put us out of action while he ran like a rabbit from the Two Powers. Come on; I’ll show you.”
Morlock inspected the crypt in the graveyard, added a few refinements to the traps, carved a warning on the door, then placed the bitter dark blade in the crypt. He and Ambrosia closed the door and activated the sealing runes.
“And that,” said Ambrosia with satisfaction, “is the end of Andhrakar!”
“Hope so.” Morlock looked at the odd angry girl in the gray light of dawn. They had been working all night, but she didn’t seem weary. There was a fire in his blood. “I wish we had met before.”
“In person, you mean? Death and Justice, so do I. Life hasn’t been easy sometimes.”
“Eh.”
They went back into the smithy as Ambrosia bent his ear about many a thing, most of which he did not understand.
In the smithy, Merlin (with his left arm and both legs bound up in splints) was talking as intently to Aloê, who was listening with a look of cool skepticism in her golden eyes.
The old man turned from her in mid-sentence as his son and daughter approached.
“So you are here at last,” the old man said sourly, “and we can finally begin the business at hand.”
“Is he ready to travel?” said Morlock over Merlin’s head to Aloê.
She had spent enough time in the Northhold to know how discourteous Morlock’s action was. Her eyes widened slightly, but she smiled and said, “There’s a sleigh. He could travel in that, if he’s of a mind to.”
“I am not!” said the old man furiously.
“Then,” Morlock said laconically, and turned to the women. “I think we should leave as soon as possible. The Two Powers took note of me when I was in the visionary state, and they may be here soon.”
“You young fool!”
“We know enough, I think, to justify a return to the Wardlands,” Morlock continued.
“Has it escaped your notice,” Merlin said querulously, “that I and my daughters are exiles and may not return there?”
“You can,” Aloê said, “under our protection. Not to stay, perhaps—sorry, honey! But to take refuge from the Two Powers and help in the struggle to maintain the guard. Worst come to worst, you can set sail on the Sea of Worlds until the Graith deals with the Powers.”
“The Graith!” Merlin said and spat, as if it were a foul taste in his mouth. “No, my dears, I have a better plan, one much more likely to succeed, now that we are gathered together. Consequently, that is the one we will follow. I have discovered a method of totally obscuring our presence from the Powers’ scope of visualization. A cloak of invisibility, as it were. But it could be penetrated by a Pursuer spell based on our shared blood.”
“Or other fluids!” Ambrosia said, looking wryly at Aloê.
“Shut up, daughter. This has not worked out quite as I hoped, but all may be well.”
“No,” said Morlock.
“You have to listen to me.”
“No,” Morlock said. “You may come with us in the sleigh, and join us on the road to the Wardlands. Or you may stay here in this charnel village that you sacrificed to feed your demons. But we will not listen to you.”
“You’re an idiot, you know. You defeated and bound one demon—the three of you. I alone bound eight of them and drove them like draft animals for months, trying to save your sorry skins—”
“Our blood, father, our blood,” interrupted Ambrosia gleefully. “Let’s not pretend you care about anything else. We saw the crypt you made for us.”
“I intended you to see it, to understand what the penalties for disobedience were. I never expected it to be used.”
“But now it has been used, as a final resting place for your pet demon—you know, the draft animal we had to save you from.”
“This is all beside the point,” Morlock said. “Merlin, will you come with us, or stay here?”
“Stay here,” said the old man sullenly with tears on his face. “Marginally better chance. Two Powers will be on you before you know it.”
“If they are,” said Morlock in the pride of his youth, “so much the worse for them,” and turned away from the wounded weeping old man.
They left the sleigh in the barn and saddled the horses for riding. The beasts were burly and underexercised, eager for a run. They were also a little restless with their reins in the hands of such inexperienced riders. (It turned out that none of them were great equestrians. Aloê had the most experience riding of the three, and she hated it.) But persuasion and firmness had their effect, and the horses in fact seemed eager to leave the town, as if they understood some of the evil that had taken place in it.
They rode toward the sea, west as straight as they could through the pathless snows.
But as they rode, the snow grew thinner and the sun seemed to creep across the sky. It kept swinging to the left, however they turned.
The air got colder, thinner, drier.
“We’re not headed toward the sea, are we?” Aloê said to Ambrosia, and found with surprise she was talking to Hope instead.
“Which sea?” Hope asked.
“The Sea of Stones,” Aloê replied.
“I don’t think we’re headed there anymore,” said Ambrosia, suddenly sitting in the saddle where her sister had been a moment before. “I don’t know where we’re headed.”
Aloê turned toward Morlock, riding glumly on the other side of her. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“We are going north and east, no matter where we try to go,” he said. “A kind of ur-path.”
“Can you figure out how to get away from it?” she asked.
“The geometry is complicated,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for many days.”
“Morlock: we only left Merlin behind this morning.”
“Time is part of it. I’m not even sure we are on the same path. Sometimes you seem so far away.”
His voice sounded so desolate that she reached out to touch him. But when her hand came to where he had been, he wasn’t there anymore. She dimly saw hi
m riding alone, far ahead of her, his head bowed as if weary or discouraged. It was a cloudy afternoon where she was, but he was already wrapped in midnight, divided from her by more than a stretch of road. By the time night swept over her, she could see him no longer.
And it was a bitter bright morning now. The grass below her horse’s hooves was dark blue, the individual stalks crunchy with a pale coating of frost. Ahead was a grim forest: the trees were a type she had never seen, with black twisting trunks and glossy blue leaves. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was enter the place. But that was where the ur-path, as Morlock called it, was leading her.
She dismounted when she reached the eaves on the forest. She turned right in the forlorn hope that she could choose her own path. He steps took her straight on into the blue shadows of the dim wintry wood.
Her horse died before she was very far in. (So it seemed. In the dense blue shadows of the wood, the passage of time was harder to track than ever.) The horse began to shudder and convulse, falling to its side and spewing up greenish froth dense with the stalks of blue grass. It died screaming in agony, its eyes extruding from their sockets, ringed with greenish foam.
Aloê was no Westholder, making a kind of religion out of horses and horse-craft, but even she was shocked and horrified by the beast’s cruel death. But she told herself it was not a pointless death. The horse had clearly been poisoned by the blue grass; she would trust no food or water in this cruel wood. Not that she had felt hunger or thirst since she had started this long lonely road.
Presently she heard voices she thought she knew, filtering through the dense thickets of black branches and blue leaves. Sometimes they seemed to be ahead of her, sometimes behind her or on either side. She tried to reach them, but the path took her always in the direction that it would, never the one she wanted.
But in the end she came into a frosty blue clearing lit by the searing cold light of Trumpeter hovering on the eastern fringe of leaves. Arguing in the clearing were Morlock and Ambrosia.
“There is no point going forward,” Morlock was saying. “We will just end up back here again.”
“But we can’t just stay here forever!” shouted the girl.
“Wherever you go,” Aloê said, “don’t go without me.”
Morlock spun about, saw her, ran toward her, and seized her with his powerful arms. Through all this he did not say anything, nor needed to.
“You guys spend a lot of time on that,” Ambrosia said, her voice about as chilly as the wintry air.
“Never enough,” said Aloê breathlessly as Morlock reluctantly loosened his embrace. She hung on for a few moments after he relaxed, and did not let him go entirely. She could not escape the dread of that feeling when she reached out her hand and he was gone, already out of reach, lost in some private night of loneliness and despair. That must never happen again. It must never be like that between them. Never again.
“Something has changed, hasn’t it?” she said, as they walked back to stand with Ambrosia in the middle of the clearing. “We are on the same path again.”
“At the end of it,” Morlock speculated. “Or near the end.”
In the silence that followed they heard someone approaching through the frosted blue bracken with long confident strides.
It was Merlin. His white mantle was ragged and stained from long travel. His face fell as he saw them standing in the clearing.
“So you are still alive,” he said. “I had hoped you would be dead by now.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” snarled Ambrosia.
“It’s nothing personal, my dear. But I calculated that, after a certain point in death, your blood will be useless as the basis of a locator spell for me, and I might use the concealment I have devised from the Two Powers. Since you were obviously set on a self-destructive course, I at least hoped to benefit from your deaths if I could not prevent them. You see that, don’t you?”
“Gross,” said his daughter.
“We are all four here,” Aloê said. “You think it is possible we can move forward now?”
“What?” said the old wizard. “Are you trapped here? How many years has it been for you since we parted?”
“Nothing so long as a year,” Morlock said.
“Hm. I thought I was going my own way, but obviously the Two Powers are waiting for us down every possible road.”
“Yes,” said his son. “Do you know how they do it?”
“Oh, now you are interested in what I have to say? Young fool. This is all your fault. No, I have no idea. If I did, I would not tell you. Knowledge is precious and rare and must be shared only with those worthy of it.”
“Eh.”
“Scintillating as always,” the irritable old necromancer remarked. “Shall we put Aloê’s suggestion to the test?”
Aloê tightened her arm around Morlock, and the four walked together into the bitter wintry wood.
The sun was waiting for them as they left the clearing, dappling the forest floor thinly between the dense clouds of dark blue leaves overhead. The day was scarcely warmer than the night had been.
“What is this place?” Aloê asked. “Are we even in the world anymore?”
“This is Tychar,” Merlin said, “where the Two Powers have dwelt since the beginning of time, according to the Anhikh sorcerer-priests. If it seems unpleasant to you, let me assure you that it could be worse. The path we are on seems to be clear of the local wildlife, which is menacing beyond belief.”
A cold glimmering mist was rising on either side of the path they walked. It rose high overhead, obscuring even the winter sun. Ambrosia reached out to touch it, curiously, and withdrew her hand with a cry of pain. For a moment, just one moment as the hand was in the glimmering fog, it seemed to be three or four hands.
“Don’t do that,” Merlin said curtly, and no one did thereafter.
The ground underfoot became rocky, dry, lacking even the venomous undergrowth of the blue wood.
A slope of dark rock appeared before them. Their path led around it, and around it again. It seemed to be changing shape as they moved.
Finally the slope disappeared and the mist sank away.
They were standing on a dark stone island surrounded by a lake of faintly glowing but utterly opaque fog.
On one side of the lake stood a throne of black and luminous white, and on it hovered rather than sat a presence of white and black lines in continuous motion.
Facing this, across the lake, was a matching throne—white for the first one’s black, black for the first one’s white. It, too, bore the weight of a presence: a spectral being of luminous white and black patches that faded in and out and shifted continually.
“Oh dear,” said Merlin drily. “I think we’ve arrived.”
You were always here/now since time/space began, thundered one of the presences. There was sound accompanying the meaning, but the symbols seemed to impose themselves directly on Aloê’s mind.
Natural law, the conflict of our wills, required it, thundered the other.
Also, I preferred it this way, signified the first god, rather snidely Aloê thought.
Liar! I preferred it first, shouted the other.
At least you admit you are a liar. I therefore deduce your following statement a lie. Ha, ha, ha. You are rebuked.
You cannot rebuke me! Neither of us can rebuke the other. Further, I rebuked you first!
They went on and on like that, their angry bolts of meaning passing back and forth over the glowing lake, the dark island.
“Why are we here, I wonder?” Aloê asked.
Ambrosius is here because we hate him, one of the presences thundered. I hated him first, it added hastily.
But I hate him with greater efficiency and truth, the other Power thundered smugly.
It is our equal and opposite intent to understand Ambrose until he is destroyed, thundered a Power.
In fact, disputed the other, we will destroy him until he is understood.
That
is in practice the same thing, and you are now being jejune, said the one Power.
No, said the other Power. You are the jejune one. I have often remarked on it.
And they hated each other back and forth for a long while.
Aloê thought glumly about the dream omens Jordel had told her about before she left the Wardlands: being sifted into different color sands, being dissected with a two-bladed knife. And: in a prison with no walls. That seemed to sum up her current position with ominous accuracy.
“How can such stupid beasts understand anything?” cried Ambrosia in torment, as the bolts of hate passed overhead.
We are not beasts, pointed out one of the Powers. We are the Two Powers.
Further, said the other Power, we are not stupid. Zahkaar is stupid. I am wise with all the events that have been fated, are fated, and will be fated.
Since no event is fated, Torlan is stupid and therefore Zahkaar is wise. Ha ha ha.
“So which is which?” Ambrosia asked, turning from one to the other.
“Stripes is Torlan; Patches is Zahkaar,” Aloê murmured. “That’s what it looks like, anyway.”
I had patches before Zahkaar, thundered the striped Power with great dignity. But they were unfitting to the Supreme Power of All.
Supreme Power of all liars, thundered Zahkaar, and they were off again, casting talic bolts of fury back and forth, as the mortals between them were shaken by their hatred and their power.
And their stupidity. Aloê more and more realized that Ambrosia was right. They were powerful beyond belief, far mightier than any god she had encountered in her travels. But they were stupid as stones.
Time passed. Ambrosia fell into unconsciousness and awoke as Hope. Morlock was appalled at first, thinking that his sister was dying. Aloê explained the business as well as she could, with Merlin throwing in a few sullen words of correction.
She was aware of a certain sense of peace and balance as she spoke but didn’t realize what it was at first. Then she knew: the Two Powers were no longer throwing hatred at each other. It was possible they were listening.
Merlin caught her eye and nodded. “Yes, there is some danger there,” he said. “Whatever we say to each other becomes part of their knowledge.”