by James Enge
“The Barons?” Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. “I'm not sure. At first I thought they might be segments of the Boneless One. But the Baron didn't know the Silent Word, or he would have used it to stop me from shelling him. Perhaps they were once Coranians, who fed on the Boneless One for so long that they became like it—”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “Fed on it how?”
“That's how your society works, Roble. The aristocracy, the Coranians, meet in the Circles, and they are fed tal by the Boneless One. That's what gives them their extended lives.”
“I thought all Coranians lived long lives.”
“Not centuries-long lives. For that they need aid, some life-source beyond their own. This they get from the Boneless One—life-sustaining tal skimmed from his victims, or fresh corpses from the wood or the Road, and transmitted through foci of power hidden in their places of ceremony. In return, of course, they see that the Boneless One gets regular meals.”
“They Bargained with the Enemy.”
“Essentially,” Morlock agreed. I guessed he hadn't heard my capital letters. To Bargain was the ultimate sin among my people, but that wouldn't mean anything to Morlock.
I walked in silence for a while, absorbing what he'd said. “Are you telling me,” I said finally, “that the Enemy could attack us in the day as easily as in the night? That there are no lawless hours…or that days are as lawless as the nights?”
“I'm certain your Enemy could act during the day. It simply chose not to. The herd could not be culled too often or too deeply; there always had to be enough stock to ensure a supply of meals in the future. Hence the Riders, and other things to keep the people of Four Castles thriving, even though a steady stream of individual persons were sacrificed. During the day, you thrived. At night, your Enemy fed.”
It was as if I was listening to someone breaking the law, knowing that it would never be unbroken again. My whole life had been turned inside out: I thought I'd been fighting the Enemy, and all the while I'd just been guarding its herd.
I glared at Morlock. To him, this was all just a puzzle, and not an especially challenging one. “You figured this out pretty quickly,” I said trying (and failing) not to sound hostile.
“When you've lived as long as I have you've seen most things more than once. The hive-cities of the Anhikh, south of here, are not so very different. But when I ascended to rapture in the Baron's hall I could read the threads of tal-contact between the Coranians in the hall and the thing in the woods, with a great dark locus in the Baron. I saw his true form then, too, hiding within its shell.”
“So what's the secret of your long life?” I demanded. “Something similar?”
Morlock looked away. I'd finally gotten under his skin somehow. “No,” he said finally. “I was born in…a guarded land, far from here. Things are different there. I can never go there now. But whatever life I have is my own, not stolen from someone else.”
I believed him, for some reason. Maybe because he seemed to have the usual complement of human bones. Which prompted me to ask, “Why does consuming someone else's tal make you boneless?”
“I'm not sure,” he said. “My sister thinks there are two kinds of tal: one which unites spirit to flesh, and another which joins spirit to bone. The flesh-tal would be easier to extract while the victim is still alive. But if you consumed only flesh-tal then your flesh would continue to live, but your bones would wither and die over time.”
This was a disturbing thought, but what really shocked me was his casual mention of his sister. When I thought about it I realized there was no reason he shouldn't have a sister. But he hadn't seemed that human to me.
We came to Besk's smithy, marked with a golden anvil painted on the door. I leapt up the stairs and entered without knocking; Morlock followed me in.
Besk wasn't there, but the boys were sitting in the middle of the shop with their bundles beside them. They rose to their feet and stared at Morlock.
“Stador. Bann. Thend. This is Morlock Ambrosius.”
Morlock and the boys nodded at each other civilly. But then Thend said, “He looks like a Coranian.”
“I'm not,” Morlock said seriously.
“He's really not,” I confirmed. “They hate his guts; believe me.” I pulled the block of beeswax out of my bag. “Listen, Morlock, I was thinking—”
“An excellent idea,” he said, nodding.
“Think there's enough wax here to stop all these big ugly ears?”
Morlock grinned one-sidedly. “Just barely. But I should tell them something about the way westward before we plug our ears. You might do well to hear it, too. Perhaps we should bolt the door so we are not interrupted.”
“No.” I was thinking that Besk would return; I didn't want to lock him out of his own place. Also, there was a question I wanted to ask him, outside of the boys' hearing. “You go back into the smithy and I'll hold the fort here. You can tell me about it later, if'—we live, I would have finished, but I noticed the boys staring at me with wide eyes—”it seems necessary.”
Morlock nodded, and Thend led the way back to the smithy.
“Why do we have to have our ears plugged?” Bann asked.
“The Enemy has a new magic,” Morlock answered seriously. “Wax in your ears will protect you from it.” The door shut behind him, cutting off his voice.
I leaned back against the shop counter and waited. I suppose it was a long time, but it didn't seem so; I had a lot to think about. Presently I heard slow footfalls coming up the stairs; the door opened and Besk stepped through.
He didn't seem surprised or pleased to see me. “Roble.”
“Besk. Does the Enemy feed you?”
Besk's face, not the cheeriest I'd ever seen it, fell even further. “I don't know,” he said at last. “There is life in the Silver Stones; in a certain ritual of the Mysteries, we can share in it, be strengthened by it. I…I don't know where the life comes from.”
“Did you ever ask? Do the Inner Circles know?”
“I don't know what they know,” he said, but his eyes would not meet mine.
“So you ate Naeli,” I said. “And Fasra. You and the other white-faces in the Circles.”
He put his hand to his pale brown forehead, as if to check its color, and said haltingly, “I…I don't know. How would I know, if it were…if it were true? No, Roble, listen.”
I nodded and motioned for him to continue.
“I learned something at the Mysteries, this morning. It's bad news from Rendel's, I'm afraid. Alev died this morning just after dawn.”
Bring the stray out, Alev had screamed after the trap had closed on both his legs. I'm done.
But I'd pried the jaws of the trap open and brought him out.
I couldn't leave him there to die, but now he was dead anyway.
I couldn't conceive of it: Alev had been my partner for four years. I could imagine not being a Rider, not living in Four Castles, my own death. But I couldn't picture a world where Alev was dead.
There was another thing I didn't understand.
“Besk,” I said, “how did you hear this? There hasn't been time for a baronial courier to ride from Rendel's to here since dawn. And no one would send a courier just to report a Rider's death, anyway.”
“It's one of the secrets,” Besk said slowly, “but I think you should know. Yes. It's necessary that you know. There is an interconsciousness in each Circle. We share things…Not wills. Each man makes his own choices. But knowledge. We know what the others know.”
“Not sure I'd care for that,” I said.
“We get used to it. It can be useful. I knew what happened at the Baron's court this morning because many of my Circle were there. But other knowledge came later.…”
“What do you mean?”
“It seemed like knowledge. It seemed so real. We learned that Morlock had used magic to delude the crowd, that you had helped him, that together you had murdered the Baron. I didn't believe it, even though
…I don't believe it. But the Circles are looking for you now.”
“If—Are you telling them where I am?”
“I would not have betrayed you by choice, Roble. Believe me. But the moment I saw you, they knew.”
A shape flew between Besk and me—a darkly luminous green bird whose form would not quite come into focus, as if it were wrapped in a dark mist. It flew around Besk's head three times. With the first pass his eyes closed; with the second his head slumped; after the third he fell to the ground. The green bird flew back to where it came from: the door of the smithy. Morlock, standing there, caught it in a glass bottle and closed the bottle with a stopper.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Sleep,” Morlock said. “Let's go.”
I looked down at the unconscious face of the old man I had loved and trusted. I found I loved and trusted him still. I would have liked to tell him so, at least once, but you can't have everything you want. If I were Liskin, I'd say it was one of the rules.
As it was, we grabbed our stuff, plugged our ears, and got out of there, running up the Road westward past the end of town. I never saw Besk, or Liskin, or Four Castles ever again. But I dream about them sometimes.
The Road ends at the western edge of Caroc Town, which is the westernmost settlement of Four Castles, but we ran on into the woods. They are tame just there, by the town, and we kept on moving as fast as we could. If there were pursuers behind us we never heard them, thanks to our beeswax earplugs. We held a hard pace, going just south of due west, at Morlock's insistence.
“We don't want to end up in Tychar,” he said, when I asked him about it. (We each unplugged one of our ears, so we could confer about our course.) “It's a nasty place.”
“I never heard of it,” I admitted.
“You wouldn't have got any travellers from that direction. People who go into the winterwood seldom live to tell about it.”
“Why don't we head due south, then?”
Morlock walked awhile in silence. “We might do so,” he said finally. “It would be less dangerous. But we would eventually end up in the Anhikh kômos of cities.”
“Kômos?”
“The word means ‘parade' or ‘dance' or something like that. I suppose you might translate it as ‘alliance.’ But there is a leader, the Kômarkh, who has an authority something like that of the Ontilian Emperor.”
I was going to ask why it would be so bad to end up there, when I remembered something Morlock had said earlier, about the Anhikh cities being like Four Castles. It was worth some risk to avoid being caught in another web like the one we were leaving behind us. We replugged our ears and went on.
An hour or two later, I had the oddest feeling—as if a voice that had been whispering at me all my life had just fallen silent. I stopped dead and looked at the others; they clearly felt it, too.
Morlock dropped his pack and pulled from it a short shovel with a pointed blade. He walked back and forth over the ground we had just passed a few times, and then started to dig down.
For a sorcerer, he wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty. I had a shovel among my things, so I pulled it out and started to dig as well. All of us unplugged our ears (we knew we were at the limit of the Enemy's influence) and we dug in shifts.
It took a couple hours to lay bare a trench only six feet long and four feet deep; the soil was interwoven with tree roots, living and dead, and we were cutting through wood as often as we were digging in dirt. Nor did we know exactly what we were looking for.
But we had no doubt when we actually found it. At first it looked like a heavy cable, thicker than a man's arm—the kind they use in the mines. Then it seemed more like a monstrous earthworm: it rippled as we looked at it in the afternoon sun. It passed from one end of the trench to the other.
“No doubt,” Morlock said, “it runs all around Four Castles and the neighboring woods. This is the anchor of the Boneless One's influence.”
“You knew it would be here,” I said.
“I guessed something like it would be. The Boneless One is extremely powerful; its influence pervades the woods and even the towns. It must emit talic impulses in waves, constantly exerting itself. But even so, the influence would be intense at its center and increasingly vague and slight everywhere else until the talic waves dissipated in the wide world…unless there were some sort of wavebreak or wall which would rebound the waves back into the wood.”
“So if we put a hole in the wall—”
“—its influence leaks away. Most of Four Castles, at any rate, will be free of it; I don't know about the Bargainers.”
“Let's cut it, then,” I said.
Morlock started to speak, hesitated, and shrugged his crooked shoulders. He picked up his sharp swordlike shovel and dug it into the wormlike cable, twisting and pushing until the thing was completely severed. Some blackish green fluid like blood poured out and began to fill the narrow trench.
“Yecch,” said Thend (speaking for all of us, I'd say).
The torn ends writhed for a bit, and then pressed against each other like two ragged mouths in a passionate kiss. Presently the ragged ends began to merge.
“We need to take out a bigger section,” I guessed.
Morlock nodded. He cut again with his shovel while I dug into the wormlike cable in the middle of the trench. When both cuts were through, we put the blades under the severed and suddenly still section of worm-cable and tossed it out of the trench.
Morlock looked bleakly at his ragged shoes, drenched with sticky cold worm blood. “I really need new shoes,” he remarked.
“Look!” I said.
The two ragged ends of worm-cable stretched and thinned and crawled toward each other over the gap of bare mud. They met and began to merge.
“Bargain the thing,” I muttered. “We need to take an even bigger section.”
“I think so,” Morlock said. “Roble, look at this.” He gestured at the section of worm-cable we had tossed out of the trench. It lay still, turning gray in the green-gold light of afternoon.
“So? It's dead—hey!”
“Yes. If we cut the thing at two widely separate points—might not the stretch between die? We would want them to be widely separated. We want as big a hole as we can make in the Boneless One's wall.”
“It might work.”
“And if it doesn't, we can try something else. I think the time has come to go different paths. Do you think you can find the border line by yourself? I might be able to fashion you a detector.”
I closed my eyes and stepped from one side of the trench to the other and back again. The whispering returned, then vanished again. “I can do it,” I said. “It's obvious where the border is.”
“Then. I'll travel north and east along the border for a day or so. You travel south and east the same length of time. This time tomorrow, we'll cut the worm, wherever we are on the border. If we're right, the wall will be broken and the dominion of the Boneless One will be over.”
“Right!” It was another night without sleep, but I could handle that. There was a trickier issue at hand. I turned to the boys, who were staring solemnly at us.
I call them boys, but one was fully grown and the other two were almost men. All of them were used to fending for themselves, working long and hard, sticking by each other. I hated to send them alone into the wilderness, but I wanted them away from this in case something went wrong.
“Boys,” I said, “Morlock is right: we part ways here. I want you to go on west and south for a day's journey. Wait there for three days. If neither Morlock nor I come to meet you there, I want you to head west to—” I looked at Morlock.
“Sarkunden,” he said. “There's a man there who owes me a favor. I gave Stador a map and a letter of introduction.”
“Good. Don't wait longer for us and don't come back; we'll catch up to you.”
“What if you don't?” Stador said matter-of-factly.
“Then make your mother proud. I'm proud of you already.�
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I hugged each one of them as Morlock stood away, repacking his shovel.
“Then,” Morlock said, waving to us all in farewell.
“See you back here in two days,” I said, although I knew how doubtful that was, and, in fact, it didn't work out that way.
In a few moments we were headed in three different directions. I tried to not look after the boys, but it was hard.
There was worse stuff, both earlier and later, but for me that night journey was the most difficult part in the whole business. I kept seeing Naeli in the woods, walking on the Enemy's side of the invisible wall. The Naeli-thing kept trying to signal me, but I was wearing my wax earplugs and looked away whenever I saw her. It bothered me, partly because I figured it must mean that the Enemy knew where I was, and what I was trying to do. But mostly it bothered me the way thoughts of Naeli always bothered me: because I had failed her and Fasra when they needed me most.
Toward dawn the Boneless One gave up; or, anyway, I stopped seeing her. I was tempted to lie down and rest when day came, but I forced myself to go on at a steady clip. When I judged it something later than midafternoon I stopped walking and started digging.
I knew, before I was fairly well along, that the Enemy knew I was there and was worried. Because the Naeli-thing appeared again. Although I was standing on the far side of the invisible wall to do my digging, she tried to approach me. I swung at her with the shovel and she backed away.
I saw her lips move. She seemed to be saying, They are coming; they are coming. Run, Roble, run.
“Drop dead,” I replied, and resumed my digging, working as fast as I could. Presently the Naeli-thing disappeared into the woods. I didn't doubt she had been telling the truth, in a way. The Enemy probably was sending Bargainers to stop me. I had to finish before they got there.
I did, but only just. I had exposed and severed an eight-foot-long section of the gigantic worm Morlock had called the anchor of the Boneless One's influence. The two frayed ends struggled desperately to meet and reunify, flopping about in the trench sloppy with muddy worm blood. But they couldn't extend so far. Then they stopped struggling and the wounds at their ends closed like mouths. They seemed to be healing even as I watched.