by Dave Duncan
Benard shrugged. “Go ahead and do it, then. If we keep your mother waiting too long, she’ll spoil all your fun by strangling me herself.”
Cutrath turned and strode on to the next god. “Holy …” The figure wore a robe and held a deck of clay tablets in his hand, but he was far younger than the Lawgiver as traditionally represented. Color him brown instead of pink …
“You are getting mighty uppity, aren’t you, showing your own brother as holy Demern?”
“Orlad’s a fine figure of a man,” Benard protested, but he looked a little guilty at Cutrath’s accusation. “He feels very strongly about oath-breaking. I had to use mortal models, you know. Gods don’t do modeling. I used you, and your brother Finar, and my other brother, and Hiddi … and Orlad looks the part!”
His expression certainly looked stubborn enough. “I honor You, holy Demern, give me Your blessing.”
“And here’s Cienu!” Benard said eagerly. “I love His smile! I’m prouder of that than anything else in the whole temple.”
Cienu, god of mirth and chance; Cienu as a naked young man holding a wine jug and wearing a mischievous, knowing smile. It was another masterpiece, of course. Oh, that face! Cutrath’s fists balled, his arms and shoulders flexed. He thought he was going to burst.
“What’s the matter?” Benard said, not looking a fraction as worried as he should. “Did you know him? Waels Borkson? Wonderful man!”
Cutrath swung around to stare at him. No, it was not deliberate. Even Benard could not be so suicidally offensive deliberately. He had always been a genius at blundering into trouble by accident.
“I met him at Nardalborg.”
“He and Orlad were very close, so—”
“I know that,” Cutrath said through clenched teeth. “I had barely walked in the gate when that Waels came over and said he heard I’d insulted a friend of his.”
Benard said, “Oo! Ahem! Oh! I mean, he never told me this, Cutrath, I swear he didn’t! If you would rather not talk—”
Cutrath looked again at the image. “He smiled at me just like that. Exactly like that. I thought it would be fun to rearrange his pretty face. So I told him what I thought of his mudface friend. In detail.”
Pause.
“Surprise?” Benard said warily.
“Yes, you could say that.” Why in the world was Cutrath telling this stonemason about it? “Like fighting a stampede of mammoths.” The worst beating of his life. After he came to, he’d had to ask permission to battle-form so he could heal his broken ribs and fractured jaw. The man to ask had been the commandant of Nardalborg, Heth Hethson, and Heth Hethson had not only been the one person who could possibly have told Waels Bork-son about Cutrath’s wrangle with Orlad at Halfway Hall, but had later turned out to be Cutrath’s cousin as well. Cutrath hadn’t known that at the time, but Heth must have.
The sculptor avoided his eye. “Didn’t know that. Waels died. Killed by Stralg, if it makes you feel any better.”
Much better. “Tell me!”
“Don’t know any details, just what my sister wrote. She said that Waels and Orlad took on Stralg in the throne room at Celebre. It was a standoff until Waels deliberately let Stralg catch him, so Orlad could get inside the Fist’s guard.” The artist hesitated. “Then Orlad killed Stralg.”
“And Therek too, I heard. Earlier.”
“Yes.”
Curiously, Cutrath felt less worked up now than he had been at first. Trying to pick a fight with Benard Celebre was totally unsatisfying, somehow. “You and your brother really thinned out my family tree, didn’t you? What happened to Fabia? At one time I was supposed to marry her.”
“She’s fine! A healthy son and another due about a thirty ago.”
“Married to?”
“Marno Cavotti. Doge of Celebre.”
Cutrath did not comment on that. He glanced up again at the haunting face of Cienu-Waels. How could even a Hand of Anziel make a lump of rock look as if it was trying to tell you something?
“Where have you been all this time?” Benard asked. “We thought you died on the Edge with Saltaja.”
Cutrath shrugged. “Hoeing fields, chopping wood, digging irrigation ditches. People only hire Werists as Werists so that they can hold killing matches with them.”
“I know,” Benard said. “It’s Horth Wigson and some of his cronies. After your uncles died and the war ended, he hired most of their men and just about all of New Dawn. He rents out hordes to towns, and that frightens their neighbors into renting larger hordes, and so on. Sooner or later two or three get together and hold a war. That reduces the supply and also makes the towns want even larger hordes. So the price goes up.”
Cutrath had never heard it explained that way. It would be believable if it didn’t came from Benard Celebre.
“How do you know all that? You’re a stonemason.”
Benard scratched his head. “Your mother explained it to me last night in … in a discussion about your coming home.”
“Dada, I wanna come home too!” Oliva announced.
“Come along, then. How did you escape from the Edge?”
“You don’t want to hear that,” Cutrath said, and told him anyway, to see how he reacted. “Some of us headed back west. We’d agreed we’d draw lots at mealtimes, but then we discovered there were other groups going the same way and we had better keep our numbers up. We preyed a lot.”
The sculptor pulled a face. “Don’t tell your mother. What I heard was that you collected the largest band of survivors, disciplined it, and led it out without losing a man to the other gangs, and they all were hailing you as their bloodlord, but you disappeared. Why didn’t you come straight home after that, for gods’s sakes?”
Cutrath swallowed the last dregs of his pride. “Because I knew you would laugh at me. Because I knew I would rip your head off and that would upset Ingeld. Because I was Horold’s son and the people would hang me. They still will, won’t they?”
“No. You’re Ingeld’s son, so they won’t.” The Florengian stared at him with a puzzled expression. “You are home again and most welcome.”
“Shut up!”
That worked. Cutrath prayed his way around the rest of the Pantheon without being interrupted, the priests carefully keeping well away. Benard followed in silence, with his daughter skipping alongside, clutching his finger.
When they came to Eriander again, Cutrath looked back. Weru was ignoring him, staring across at holy Veslih. So He didn’t care.
But Cienu was still smiling at him.
“What are you looking at?” Benard murmured softly.
“Damn you! That smile.”
“And what do you see?”
“I see Waels Borkson saying, ‘Remember how you screamed when I stomped your kidneys?’”
“But what you are supposed to see,” Benard said, “is holy Cienu, Who called you here. And what He’s telling you is, ‘Waels Borkson is dead and all that remains of him are memories and this block of stone; but you’re still alive, so go and enjoy life while you can.’”
He started down the steps, holding Oliva’s hand so she could jump each one. “Come on!” he called back cheerfully. “Now you’ve done what the oneiromancer said, everything will be all right. Cienu is god of parties, remember. Wait until you see what Ingeld’s planning.”
Cutrath shrugged and trotted down the steps after them. One chariot stood there, with a grinning urchin proudly holding the reins.
“Um?” Cutrath said. “Where’s the bodyguard you mentioned?”
Oliva took her thumb out of her mouth. “Dada sneaked out without them,” she said solemnly. “Mommy said she’d spank him if he did it again.”
Benard swung her up into his arms. “So you’d better not tell her. I’ll hold you, and brother Cutrath will drive the chariot.”
“Is Cutrath a good driver?”
“He’s a very good driver.” Tossing the urchin something shiny that made him whoop with glee, Benard stepped up into the car.
Oliva said solemnly, “Mommy says you’ll kill someone someday.”
“I know. That’s why Cutrath will drive. Come along, Hordeleader.”
In spite of himself, Cutrath climbed aboard and took the reins. “I really should try that gut extraction on you. I’m sure I won’t rest until I do.”
“Messy,” Benard said. “I’m cutting a statue of your father that’s going very well. Hiddi’s back in town, by the way. You must see the new temple of Nula I’m designing.” He grinned happily. “Veal for dinner tonight! Ingeld says it’s your favorite.”
“Fat one?”
“Fat and greasy as they come.”
Cutrath’s mouth started watering fit to drown him. He sighed. “All right. Feast tonight, murder you tomorrow.”
appendix
THE WORLD
Fantasy worlds are impossible by definition. As I warned you at the beginning of Children of Chaos, the Dodecians’ view of their world cannot be even remotely correct.
A regular dodecahedron is a solid enclosed by twelve identical pentagons. The twelve faces share thirty edges and twenty vertices. Regular dodecahedrons do not occur in nature, although the crystal form called pyritohedron comes close. A polyhedron cannot be scaled up to planet size, because no irregular solid is strong enough to resist the crushing force of gravity. Asteroids can be nonspherical, but only the smaller ones. For example, Amalthea, an almond-shaped moon of Jupiter, measures 167 by 93 miles (268 by 150 km), but density measurements show that it is a pile of rubble. Rubble or not, any body much larger than that must collapse into a sphere under its own weight.
Even if the core and mantle of the planet were so impossibly rigid that they could hold their shape against gravity, erosion would strip the crust at the edges and wash the sediment into the oceans. This happens on Earth, too, and tectonic movements push the sediment piles up into mountains in a never-ending cycle, but the scale of vertical movement does not come close to what would be needed to turn the planet into a polyhedron.
To prove how absurd the Dodecian view is, consider what Dodec would be like if it had the same mass and volume as the Earth. Every edge would be 3,250 miles (5,200 km) long, and each face slightly larger than Asia. That is big!
For simplicity, assume that the north pole is located exactly at the northernmost vertex of Vigaelia. Three faces must meet at every vertex, so there would be an arctic region of three “polar” faces and a matching triplet of antarctic faces. The remaining six, “tropical,” faces would form a chain around the middle, pointing alternately north and south. Vigaelia is therefore polar, and Florengia tropical.
Because a plane presents a uniform angle to the sun, the faces would lack the north-south insolation gradient we take for granted on a spherical planet. Each face would show a radial change in climate, because the atmosphere would be much less dense near the edges. There would be edge ice caps.
The six tropical faces would be inclined at an average 10° to the “equator,” equivalent to the latitude of, say, Panama. The six polar faces would have a tilt of 52°, about the same as London, England. Since Dodec is known to have seasons, its axis of rotation must be tilted with respect to the ecliptic, but all we know about the amount of tilt is that it is less than 38°, for otherwise Vigaelia would have no daylight at midwinter. The changing tilt would cause seasonal effects, but the hours of daylight would remain the same year-round, so seasonal climatic change would be much less than we are used to. Seasonal variation would be negligible on the tropical faces—but note that midwinter on a tropical face would coincide with midsummer for its neighbor on either side.
We are rarely aware that the Earth is round. We do not see large bodies of water as dome-shaped, and yet if you look at a calm sea or large lake, standing with your feet at water level, your horizon is less than three miles (five kilometers) away. In other words, we perceive the globe as flat. I suspect that a flat world would seem to be concave. On Dodec the center of each face would be much closer to the center of the planet than the edges are, so water would tend to run to the middle and pile up. If you stood at an edge and looked across that enormous plane, you might well feel you were looking down into a bowl with a heap of ocean in the center. Dodec has no moon, because the mere thought of tides gives me the willies.
On polar faces, such as Vigaelia, the dominant climatic factor would be seasonal variation acting on the central ocean, which would warm up and cool down more slowly than land would. In summer, when the ocean was relatively cool, air would rise over land areas and sink in the center, giving an outward radial flow at the surface. In winter, when the ocean was relatively warmer, the flow would be reversed. Coriolis forces would make the prevailing winds blow clockwise in summer, counterclockwise in winter.
Not only would tropical faces, like Florengia, lack much seasonal variation, the small angle they would subtend to the planetary axis would make their Coriolis forces weaker, although not completely ineffectual. (Note that the “equator” would have no direct significance to those forces. On the Florengian Face, the southernmost vertices would be the farthest points from the axis and thus have the greatest rotational velocity. Fluids would move as if the entire face lay in the northern “hemisphere.”) Florengian weather, like Vigaelian, would be controlled by heat exchange between the hot, humid maritime center and the cold, dry uplands. Coastal areas would be jungles, racked by cyclonic storms, while the rims would be cold desert. The “fertile circle” in which Celebre is reported to stand must be a benign temperate zone in between. Such a zone could be relatively narrow but still enormous in actual area.
The weirdness goes on. Because the oceans would be domed, the sun would be able to set behind them, or reflect off them. It would be nice to think of the horizon flaming up bright green like an iceberg, but water on such a scale is not transparent. The domes would be opaque.
Air is not perfectly transparent either. From the window of a commercial jetliner in flight, the horizon is a blur, and yet it is only about 200 miles (300 km) distant, which is a trivial vista on Dodec. Rising hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from you, the sun would have to climb over the limit of transparency of the atmosphere, the “wall of the world.”
Where water goes, so goes air. The maximum topographical variation on Earth, from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, is 12.4 miles (20 km). By coincidence, the deviation of the terrestrial geoid from a perfect sphere is of similar magnitude—ice floes at the terrestrial north pole are 13 miles (21 km) closer to the center of the planet than a surfer at the equator. The mean radius of the Earth is 3,966 miles (6,378 km).
On a polyhedral Dodec the ocean bed at the midpoint of each Face would be 3,600 miles (5,800km) from the center. Sea level would depend on how much water the planet had, how much was tied up in ice caps, and how equitably it was distributed between the twelve faces, but if Dodec had about the same amount of water as the earth, the ocean would dome up roughly 50 miles (80 km) deep at the center and be 1,200 miles (1,900 km) across. Nardalborg Pass would then lie 600 miles (960 km) above sea level, and each vertex would be 350 miles (560 km) higher yet. Breathing would certainly be a problem.
Even if the planetary mass and volume were the same as the Earth’s, nowhere on the surface of Dodec would gravity be as strong. This conclusion is counterintuitive, but a sphere is the most stable shape simply because it maximizes gravitational force at its surface. Lesser surface gravity would produce a lesser density gradient in the atmosphere. Furthermore, those enormous vertex “mountains” would produce complex gravity fields of their own, dragging some air away from a purely spherical shape. Even so, holding your breath long enough to cross the Nardalborg Pass would not be advisable.
I hope such technical quibbles did not spoil your visit.
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