The Edge of the World

by Kevin J. Anderson

  One bandit chuckled at the boy's audacity and swung his scimitar, but Saan met the blade with his own, surprising the man. With a parry, he slashed the bandit's inner arm, and the man yelped as blood spurted. He wheeled his horse about, pressing his other hand against the pulsing wound.

  At the edge of the camp, the bandit leader shouted through the scarf that covered his face, "Take what you can, and go!" The invaders snatched food and weapons as the Missinian guards »rallied to defend themselves. Xivir's men struck down two more

  bandits before the rest of the raiding party thundered back into the starlit dunes, leaving their fallen behind.

  Three camp archers launched a flight of arrows after the retreating men. One shaft plunged into the bandit leader's meaty shoulder, and he slumped over his horse but did not fall. He kept riding.

  Soldan Xivir rallied the men. "Prepare for pursuit!"

  Standing protectively close to Sen Sherufa, Imir stared at the burning tents, at the damage that had been done. "Leave them! We have few enough men, and they could ambush us out there. Our priority is to protect the sand coracle."

  Xivir reddened, but he obeyed without voicing a complaint.

  Flushed and breathless, Asaddan waited near the wicker basket and silk balloon sack, tentpole still gripped in his hands. He had been ready to die to defend their vessel, so great was his desire to go home. Saan grinned at the Nunghal, who responded

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  with a gap-toothed smile of his own. They understood each other.

  The night wind had picked up, and Saan could feel the increasing breezes. The camp lay in disarray, many of the tents ruined, their supplies gone or scattered. But, all in all, disaster had been averted.

  - Imir announced, "We'd better depart as soon as the sun rises."

  103

  Gremurr Mines

  Prester Hannes sat on deck in the blistering sun amid a group of huddled prisoners. The slaver dromond worked its way up the rugged northern coast of the Middlesea; even from a distance, a smear of smoke marked their destination, the Gremurr mines. The men chained beside him were sweaty, dirty, and miserable. They complained incessantly. "We are innocent! We have committed no crime!" "We do not deserve this. Free us!" "I know many nobles. The soldan-shah will punish you if you don't release me."

  But they were lying. The Urecari always lied. Hannes knew that not a single person here was innocent, and they all had unforgivable heresy in their hearts. He remained quiet, watching, learning... and hating.

  He had nearly made it home, within sight of Tierra... and then this setback. It could not be an accident: Ondun was showing Hannes that he had further work to do, so he did not complain. He was merely a vessel of flesh created to serve the needs of God.

  Nevertheless, he did not like the idea oflaboring in the mines.

  As the dromond carried its prisoners toward a forbidding, rocky shore, Hannes liked the place even less. The mountains formed impenetrable bastions with sheer cliffs pockmarked by mine tunnels. Mounds of shattered rock debris and tailings lay strewn about at the base of each mine opening. Shirtless, filthy men worked with sledgehammers and pickaxes, breaking the rubble, digging out veins of ore. Heavy barges rested against the reinforced wharves, weighed down with processed ingots or finished metal sheets and swords. Additional barges lay at anchor farther out, waiting to be loaded with cargo.

  Flatboats mounded with coal pulled up to smelters, where more sweaty men shoveled the black rock into bins. Hannes heard the incessant clink of tools and crack of whips. Too thick for the sea breezes to scour away, a pall of smoke clogged the air, caught in the valleys, and clung tenaciously to cliff faces. Upwind from the smoke, a small palace and several permanent-looking homes belonged to the highest-ranking officials.

  On the flat rocky shore were tents and wooden shacks, squalid shelters for the prisoners and slightly better barracks for the soldier-guards. Hannes had lived in worse places, and he knew he could endure hard labor in the name of Ondun.

  The slaver dromond tied up at a separate set of docks, where two men waited to meet the new arrivals. The first was a husky man of about thirty years, well dressed and with somewhat effeminate features--obviously not a man accustomed to physical work. Beside him stood a man of nearly the same height, but older and meaner looking, exuding implacability. His body was hard muscle, his face rigid.

  The pampered-looking man spoke up as crewmen unlocked the prisoners' chains. "My name is Tukar, brother of SoldanShah Omra." He sounded proud of the fact. "I hold your lives

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  in my hand. I am your master here. You will help us to create weapons and armor for the glory of Urec." He paused, as though expecting applause or cheers. The slave ship's captain snarled, and the prisoners mumbled their obligatory support as they shuffled toward the disembarkation ramp. Hannes made no sound at all.

  The hard-looking man took one step forward. "And I am Zadar, the slave master. Tukar may hold your lives in his hands, but /control your level of misery. Your life in Gremurr will never be pleasant, but there are varying degrees of pain. I am the man who makes that decision. I am the one you must impress."

  Hannes studied the two men and decided that Tukar was harmless; Zadar was the man to watch out for.

  "Many hours of daylight remain," Tukar said. "Zadar will issue your assignments. It's time for you to get to work."

  After a week, most slaves surrendered any thought of resistance. Hannes did not. He settled into a routine of exhausting labor, but a routine gave him the ability to plan. A routine allowed him to find weaknesses. He took his time. In his years in Uraba, moving from village to village, he had learned patience.

  He ignored the ache in his arms as he shoveled crushed ore into the open hatch of a reinforced cargo barge. Gremurr's five smelters processed some of the metal, but they did not have the capacity to produce all the copper, tin, and iron Uraba required. Since the rugged rocky coastline offered little wood for making charcoal to fire the furnaces, heavily laden barges sailed across K the Middlesea with coal mined from rich veins in Missinia.

  When the day's shift ended, all the prisoners filed back to the encampment. There were no sikara priestesses here, no sunset services, no prayers to Urec--no religion whatsoever. The mines were a harsh and godless place. These people were all fol

  snpi

  lowers of Urec, but they had no faith--not the prisoners, not the guards, perhaps not even the administrators. Prester Hannes wondered, quite seriously, whether Aiden preferred men to be entirely godless or to follow the wrong religion.

  In the evenings, Hannes sat at long tables with the other prisoners, who were too exhausted for conversation. He ate his bowl of watery fish stew, accepting the food without comment, but finding irony in the fact that his captors were giving him the nourishment he required in order to turn on them. When he sat to eat, Hannes always chose a bench that faced toward the mountains, so he could constantly study the cliffs and canyons, in search of possible passes that would lead him out of here.

  The guards insisted that there could be no escape, that the cold and rocky wilderness would kill them. His fellow prisoners were convinced that no one could survive the impassable mountains, but those men, Hannes knew, were weak, meek, and beaten. He had the faith of Aiden in his heart. He had the strength and blessing of Ondun.

  He also knew that those mountains were part of Corag Reach. On the other side lay Tierra. The crags seemed to pose an ominous challenge, but Prester Hannes had done the impossible before.

  104

  Iboria

  Another vision quest in the arctic wastes--his thirteenth such journey--and this time Destrar Broeck went alone. He took his furs, mittens, and eye protection against the stinging snow and blinding whiteness; he carried dried food, and he could add snow

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  to a water pouch inside his coat, where it would melt for drinking water. Broec
k needed nothing else for his body, yet he needed so much more for his soul.

  He left Calavik abruptly, having awakened at night after an unsettling dream. For most of his life, he'd been a hale and hearty man who loved people, loved noise, and loved his memories, but now Broeck realized that his heart was hibernating like a brown bear from the deep forests. So he packed his things the next morning and announced his intentions. Iborians were accustomed to a man's need to be alone and face the challenges of a self-imposed quest.

  Broeck journeyed north to the tundra, where he joined a family of itinerant mammoth herders, who occasionally drove mammoths down to Calavik, where the beasts were domesticated and put to work hauling logs down to the rivers. Broeck accepted their quiet hospitality for three days before setting off for the distant white lands even farther north. He thanked the mammoth herders, then said, "I have hunting to do. A private hunt."

  In all his life, Broeck had seen an ice dragon only twice. Now he stalked it. He had to hunt the monster, had to defeat it with the three long sharp iron spears strapped to his back. He trudged in fur-lined boots across the packed snow and ice, skirting ominous dark areas that hinted at fragile fissures. He knew how dangerous and unpredictable the north could be.

  When his wife, Wilka, had vanished in the snowstorm, her oss took him completely by surprise. She had lived her life in Iboria, and she knew the vagaries of its weather. She should have watched the shapes of the clouds, noticed the changing taste of the winds. Broeck had never thought he needed to worry about her. Wilka...

  He'd always had a fondness for frostberries, and though it was late in the season, Wilka had gone out by herself, wandering far

  to find unpicked bushes. She shouldn't have been so far from home, from shelter, but the anniversary of their wedding day had been nigh. That evening, when she didn't return, while Broeck had huddled in their house from the blizzard outside, holding his five-year-old daughter, he had noticed the makings of a pie that Wilka had begun. She had gone out to pick the berries for him.

  Ilrida had cried in his arms as the wind howled, and he had hoped against hope that Wilka had seen the brewing storm in time and made her way to a cabin or a hunting camp. The next morning, as the storm continued, he and ten searchers--against their common sense--had trudged out through the howling white gale, shouting her name, but the words were snatched away by the jaws of the blizzard. They had not found Wilka's body until the spring thaw

  Despite the legend, the ice dragon certainly hadn't protected her.

  As he raised his daughter, Broeck had thought he would eventually heal from the emptiness. He devoted himself to ruling his reach, knowing his people, working hard in the forests, and wandering out on his vision quests. He had survived, and had gradually become himself again.

  And then a single scratch from a rusty nail...

  For three years now he'd waited for the pain of losing Ilrida to abate, for the sadness to lift from him like a freezing fog on a winter's day. He had missed his daughter when she left to marry King Korastine, but that was nothing compared to the cold wound left by her death. At first he doubted that even Korastine's anguish could match the chasm in Broeck's own heart, yet when he saw the utterly lost expression in the king's eyes, he knew he was wrong.

  The ice dragon's protection no longer seemed to benefit Iboria.

  I

  By contrast, the king's new Arkship project gave them all a beacon of hope, a beacon far more significant than the safety of his cold and sparsely populated reach. Though many people complained about the enormous and costly construction project, Destrar Broeck understood the need for a ruler to create works greater than himself. If there was a chance to find the land of Holy Joron, Ilrida would have insisted on going herself.

  The Arkship could not truly be completed until Broeck contributed a vital, yet mystical, part to its construction. If Raathgir's horn could indeed protect a ship from other sea monsters, then Aiden's blessing could be conferred on King Korastine's bold giant vessel

  It was the time of the brief thaw in the great white north, the season when the ice dragon was most likely to surface. As he made his way toward the mountains of snow and ice, Broeck removed his mittens and knelt to touch the ground so that his sensitive fingertips might feel the vibrations. The stumps of his missing, frostbitten fingers throbbed, as if with a sympathetic connection to the cold. Concentrating, he listened for the rumble, then followed lightning-bolt cracks in the ice, tracing them to their origin.

  Knowing he was close, he looked up at the snowpack, the fissures in the icy cliffs. He sipped meltwater from the pouch inside his coat, chewed on dried meat to fortify himself. When he reached a solid ice cliff, Broeck thrust his three spears, points upward, into the packed snow so they stood ready and available.

  Drawing deep, cold breaths, he unslung the iron ice hammer from his waist and swung it with all his strength into the frozen wall. A spiderweb of cracks radiated from the impact point. Broeck pounded again and again, knowing the thunderous sound would attract the ice dragon. "Come to me, damn

  you!" he shouted into the cold wind. He slammed the mallet a final time, and the crack went deeper into the ice cliff. "Ho, Raathgir!"

  Behind the smeared barrier, he saw a reptilian slither, a blue silver blur shifting and moving. The cracks in the ice wall widened, and Broeck staggered back, seizing the first spear just as the cliff split open. Behind the crack the enormous serpentine body glided through a slick-walled tunnel, like an adder crafted from frozen metal.

  Boulders of ice calved away, falling all around him. Broeck dodged and ducked, then stood his ground with the first spear, fitting it into his full-fingered grip. The ice dragon's triangular head burst out, glaring with pearl-white eyes, its fangs flashing like silver icicles. A single knurled horn protruded more than two meters from the center of its bony-plated forehead. It lunged out, breathing a gust of freezing mist. Broeck dodged, feeling the impenetrable shattering cold ripple past him.

  He hurled his first spear at the base of Raathgir's throat. The sharp point smashed into the creature's hard scales, and silver and blue shards tinkled from the serpentine neck, leaving a bare patch on its throat. Roaring, the ice dragon lunged down at Broeck and sent the destrar sprawling as it smashed its head into the snow.

  When Wilka was lost out in the blizzard, did the howl of the storm winds sound like the ice dragon's roar?

  He scrambled up, grabbed his second spear, whirled. When the ice dragon reared up and opened its fanged mouth, Broeck threw the second spear into its throat, where it stuck.

  The ice dragon thrashed in agony, smashing its head against the cliff, snapping the cold-brittle spear shaft, but leaving the iron point embedded. Broeck seized his third and last spear, spread his booted feet, and cocked his arm back, waiting for Raathgir

  to turn toward him. When it did, he let the spear fly directly into the naked patch on the dragon's throat. Deadlier than a scratch from an iron nail...

  Steaming black blood sprayed out. The ice dragon gave a dying roar that sounded like the harshest blizzard of the year. Broeck scrambled away, taking shelter among the blocks of ice and snow that had collapsed from the cliff, and waited while the creature thrashed in its death throes. Finally, with a great sigh, Raathgir slumped onto the packed ice. Black blood stained the pure white snow. It twitched once more, and its long snakelike body oozed the rest of the way out of its warren of cliff tunnels.

  j Broeck stared at the magnificent beast, feeling great sadness now as he had second thoughts about what he had done. But he hardened himself and remembered his purpose. He drew his ax and stepped forward.

  I The immense knurled horn of the ice dragon would be perfect I for the prow of the Arkship. Iboria may have lost the aura of ' Raathgir's protection, but King Korastine--and the hope of all Tierra--would gain it.

  105

  The Great Desert

  After the excitement and terror of the bandit attack, Saan was ready to go as soon as dawn's glow gra
ced the desert. The southH erly breezes would whip up with the rising heat of the day, and they wanted to take advantage of the strongest gusts to whisk them across the expanse of dunes.

  Soldan Xivir clapped his hands to rally everyone in the camp.

  "The soldan-shah has spoken. Come, let us get these travelers on their way."

  "Precipitous decisions often lead to mistakes," Sen Sherufa cautioned as the men rushed about making final preparations. She was still rattled by the raid. "Are you sure you aren't being rash, Imir?"

  The former soldan-shah brushed aside her concerns. "We have been ready for days, my dear. It is time to go!"

  Asaddan crossed his arms over his big chest. "Yes, it is time to go." He had taken the time to replait the braids in his ebony hair, which now hung like dark ropes around his head.

  While Sherufa circled the base of the coracle for a final inspection, Saan and Imir filled the iron brazier inside the basket with coal from the camp's supply; Saan lit the fire, stoking it until the black rock glowed bright orange. The heat rose, puffing breath into the colorful silken balloon tied to the basket, swelling it into a spherical shape that stretched the guy ropes and the support netting. The coracle's wicker body creaked and groaned like the rigging on a sailing ship.

  Saan tested the taut hemp ropes from outside the basket. "I'm ready as soon as the balloon is."

  "You'd better be." Asaddan nudged him into the basket. "The balloon will not wait for you."

  Imir graciously assisted Sen Sherufa, though she seemed perfectly prepared to climb in without help. Asaddan stood, feet apart, as though savoring the last few moments of solid ground. He raised his voice to address Soldan Xivir, the guards, the camp workers as equals. "People of Uraba, I promise to keep my companions safe--with Saan's help, of course!"

  "Yes, Asaddan, I will protect you, if need be." Saan quickly realized how crowded the coracle would be, at least until they consumed some of the salvaged supplies, drank the water, burned the coal.