by Larry Niven
The Warlock was not pleased.
“What exactly are you gloating about? We had the big conference fifty years ago. The power existed, then. But you and your group wanted to make maps.”
Piranther’s half-smile disappeared. His small black hand stroked the skin bag at his chest—and forces could be felt gathering.
“I know of a mana source,” said the skull on the Warlock’s shoulder.
Wavyhill saw that he had everyone’s attention. “I thought I had better interrupt while we still had a conference. I wish I could give guarantees, but I can’t. I may know of a living god, the last in the world. I’ll lead you to it.”
“I find this hard to believe,” Piranther said slowly. “A remaining god? When even the dragons are nearly gone? When half the world’s fishing industries are run by men, from boats, because the merpeople have died off?”
“It seems more believable when you know the details. I’ll tell you the details, and I’ll lead you to it,” said Wavyhill. “But I want oaths sworn. To the best of your abilities, when we have gained sufficient mana for the spells to work, will each of you do your best to return me to my human form?”
Nobody hurried to answer.
“Remember, your oaths will be binding. A geas is more powerful than any natural law, in a domain of rich mana. Well?”
“I had other projects in mind,” Piranther said easily. “Your oath would claim too much of my time. Also, you have a much greater interest in the Warlock’s project than any of us.”
“Your interest isn’t slight,” said Wavyhill. “We who pull down the power of the Moon will rule the world.”
“True enough. But why should you have a head start on the rest of us while we fulfill your geas? Swear us the same oath, Wavyhill. Then we can all scurry about for ways to put you back together again. Otherwise we’ll wake to find you ruling us.”
“Willingly,” said Wavyhill, and he swore.
Piranther listened with his half-smile showing, while Mirandee and the Warlock and, reluctantly, Clubfoot swore Wavyhill’s oath.
Then, “I will not swear,” said Piranther. “Thus I presume you will not guide me?” He stood, lithely, and walked away. If he expected voices calling him back, there were none, and he walked away toward Prissthil.
“That means trouble,” said Wavyhill.
“We can do it without him,” said Clubfoot.
“You don’t follow me,” said Wavyhill. “I meant what I said. If we fail, there is no world. If we draw the power of the Moon, we rule the world. If Piranther follows us and learns what we learn, and if Piranther is there when we pull down the Moon or whatever, he’s the only one of us who can concentrate purely on controlling it.”
Clubfoot saw it now. “You and your stupid oath.”
“He’ll have serious trouble following us,” said the Warlock.
The Mountain
They climbed Mount Valhalla on foot: three magicians, two porters hired in Prissthil, Orolandes carrying a porter’s load, and the skull of Wavyhill still moored to the Warlock’s shoulder. Wavyhill’s eyes had been replaced with rubies.
He had hired the porters, he had chosen their equipment, but Orolandes had no idea why he was going up a mountain. He had asked Wavyhill, “Is the last god at the peak, then?”
“Gear us for the peak,” Wavyhill had told him, “and don’t think too much. Piranther can read your mind. He’ll be getting your surface thoughts until we can break you loose.”
The porters were small, agile, cheerful men. They did better than Orolandes at teaching the magicians elementary climbing techniques. They showed neither awe of the magicians’ power nor scorn for their clumsiness. To natives of Prissthil a magician was a fellow-professional, worthy of respect.
Clubfoot was a careful climber, little hampered by his twisted foot. But they were all aging, even Mirandee of the smooth pale skin and the white hair. On the first night they hurt everywhere. They couldn’t eat. They moaned in their sleep. In the morning they were too tired and stiff to move, until hunger and the smell of breakfast brought them groaning from their blankets.
It was good for Orolandes’ self-confidence, to see these powerful beings so far out of their element. He became marginally less afraid of them. But he wondered if they had the stamina to continue.
As the ascent grew steeper the packs grew lighter. Food was eaten. Heavy cloaks were taken from the packs and worn. But the air grew lean, and Orolandes and the porters panted as they climbed.
Not so the magicians. With altitude they seemed to gain strength. Here above the frost line there were even times when the rich creamy fall of Mirandee’s hair would darken momentarily, then grow white again.
It usually happened when they were passing one of the old fallen structures.
They had passed the first of these on the third day. No question about what it was. It was an altar, a broad slab of cut rock richly stained with old blood. “This was why the gods survived so long here,” the Warlock told Orolandes. “Sacrifice in return for miracles. But when the gods’ power waned in the lands below the mountain, the miracles weren’t always granted. The natives didn’t know why, of course. Eventually they stopped sacrificing.”
Higher structures were stranger, and not built by men. They passed a cluster of polished spheres of assorted sizes, fallen in a heap in a patch of snow. They glowed by their own light: four big spheres banded in orange and white, one with a broad ring around it; three much smaller, one mottled ochre and one mottled blue-and-white and one shining white; and two, the smallest, the yellow-white of old bone. Further on was a peaked circular structure sitting on the ground. It looked like a discarded roof.
Though Orolandes was still the master climber, this was evidently magicians’ territory.
There was no firewood on the third night. It was not needed. After they made camp the magicians—tired but cheerful, no longer bothered by strained muscles—sang songs in a ring around a sizeable boulder, until the boulder caught fire. Another song brought a unicorn to be slaughtered and butchered by the porters. Orolandes could only admire the porters’ aplomb. They roasted the meat and boiled water for herb tea on a burning rock, as if they had been doing it all their lives.
After dinner, as they were basking around the fire, Clubfoot said to Mirandee, “You know that I’ve admired you for a long time. Will you be my wife while our mission lasts?”
Orolandes was jolted. Never would he have asked a woman such a question except in privacy. But Clubfoot did not expect to be turned down…and it showed in his face when Mirandee smiled and shook her head. “I gave up such things long ago,” she said. “Being in love ruins my judgment. It takes my mind off what I’m doing, and I ruin spells. But I thank you.”
On the morning of the fourth day they came on a flight of stairs leading up from the lip of a sheer cliff. Aided by climbing ropes, they crawled sideways along an icy slope to reach the stairs: broad slabs of unflawed marble that narrowed as they rose, but that rose out of sight into the clouds.
Placed on random steps were statues, human, half-human, not at all human. Orolandes tried to forget, and could not, a half-melted thing equipped with tentacles and broad clawed flippers and a single eye. But there was a hardwood statue of a handsome, smiling man that Orolandes found equally disturbing, and for no reason at all. Magic. Here where men could not live because they could not grow food, magic still lived.
Snow and ice covered the rocks to either side, but no ice had formed on the marble. The stairway rose past strange things. Here was something shattered, a hollow flowing shape that must have looked like a teardrop flowing upward before it broke at the base and toppled. There, a single tree bore a dozen kinds of ripe fruit; but it withered as the magicians came near, until nothing was left but a dry stick.
And there, a section seemed to have been bitten out of the mountainside to leave a broad flat place. An arena, it was, where two sets of metal-and-leather armor stood facing each other in attack position, weapons raised, ea
ch piece of armor suspended in air. As the little party climbed past, the armor dropped in two heaps.
The Warlock stopped. “Orolandes, climb down there and get one of those swords.”
“I gave up swords,” said Orolandes.
“Maybe you won’t use it, but you should have it. Magic can’t do everything. None of us has ever used a sword…except Wavyhill.”
The skull laughed on his shoulder. “Much good it did me, then and now. Get the sword, Greek.”
Orolandes shucked his pack and clambered down and across the icy slope. At his approach the fallen armor stirred, then slumped. He chose the straight-bladed sword over the scimitar. It would fit his scabbard. It felt natural in his hand, but it roused unpleasant memories.
He was turning to go when he saw what had been hidden from the stair by a shoulder of rock.
Rows of thrones carved into the slanted rock face. Stands for the battle’s audience. On each of the scores of thrones a wisp of fog shifted restlessly.
Orolandes retreated behind his sword. Nothing followed.
Now the marble stairs above them were hidden by cloud, the banner of cloud that always streamed from the mountain’s peak.
The Warlock dismissed the porters, paying them in gold. Orolandes piled what was left in the packs into one pack, and they went on, up into the cloud.
The cold became wet cold. Ice crystals blew around them. The magicians below were half-hidden. Orolandes climbed with one hand on the rock wall. The other side was empty space.
The snow-fog thinned. They were climbing out of the cloud.
They emerged, and it was glorious. The cloud bank stretched away like a clean white landscape, under a brilliant sun and dark blue sky. The Warlock rubbed his hands in satisfaction. “We’re here! Orolandes, let me get into that pack.”
The others watched as he chose his tools. If the Warlock had told them what he was about, Orolandes hadn’t heard it. He did not speculate. He waited to know what was expected of him.
The attitude came easily to him. He had risen through the ranks of the Greek army; he could follow orders. He had given orders, too, before Atlantis sank beneath him. Since then Orolandes had given over control of his own fate.
“Good,” muttered the Warlock. He opened a wax-stoppered phial and poured dust into his hand and scattered it like seeds into the cloudscape. He sang words unfamiliar to Orolandes.
Mirandee and Clubfoot joined in, clear soprano and awkward bass, at chorus points that were not obvious. The song trailed off in harmony, and the Warlock scattered another handful of dust.
“All right. Better let me go first,” he said. He stepped off the stairs into feathery emptiness.
He bounced gently. The cloud held him.
Clubfoot followed, in a ludicrous bouncing stride that sank him calves-deep into the fog. Mirandee walked out after him. They turned to look back at Orolandes.
Clubfoot started to choke. He sat down in the shifting white mist and bellowed with a laughter that threatened to strangle him. Mirandee fought it, then joined in in a silvery giggle. There was the not-quite-sound of Wavyhill’s chortling.
The laughter seemed to fade, and the world went dim and blurry. Orolandes felt his knees turn to water. His jaw was sagging. He had climbed up through this cloud. It was cold and wet and without substance. It would not hold a feather from falling, let alone a man.
The witch’s silver laughter burned him like acid. For the lack of the Warlock’s laughter, for the Warlock’s exasperated frown, Orolandes was grateful. When the Warlock swept his arm in an impatient beckoning half-circle, Orolandes stepped out into space in a soldier’s march.
His foot sank deep into what felt like feather bedding, and bounced. He was off balance at the second step, and the recoil threw him further off. He kicked out frantically. His leg sank deep and recoiled and threw him high. He landed on his side and bounced.
Mirandee watched with her hands covering her mouth. Clubfoot’s laugh was a choking whimper now.
Orolandes got up slowly, damp all over. He waded rather than walked toward the magicians.
“Good enough. We don’t have a lot of time,” said the Warlock. “Take a little practice—we all need that—then go back for the pack.”
Cloudscapes
The layer of cloud stirred uneasily around them. It was not flat. There were knolls of billowing white that they had to circle round. It was like walking through a storehouse full of damp goose down. The cloud-stuff gave underfoot, and pulled as the foot came forward.
Orolandes found a stride that let him walk with the top-heavy pack, but it was hard on the legs. Half-exhausted and growing careless, he nearly walked into a hidden rift. He stared straight down through a feathery canyon at small drifting patches of farm. A tiny plume of dust led his eye to a moving speck, a barely visible horse and rider.
He turned left along the rift, while his heart thundered irregularly in his ears.
Clubfoot looked back. Mount Valhalla rose behind them, a mile or so higher than they’d climbed, blazing snow-white in the sunlight. “Far enough, I guess. Now, the crucial thing is to keep moving,” he said, “because if the magic fails where we’re standing it’s all over. Luckily we don’t have to do our own moving.”
He helped Orolandes doff the pack. He rummaged through it and removed a pair of water-tumbled pebbles, a handful of clean snow, and a small pouch of grey powder. “Now, Kranthkorpool, would you be so kind as to tell us where we’re going?”
“No need to coerce me,” said Wavyhill. “We go east and north. To the northernmost point of the Alps.”
“And we’ve got food for four days. Well, I guess we’re in a hurry.” Clubfoot began to make magic.
The Warlock did not take part. He knew that Clubfoot was a past master at weather magic. Instead he watched Mirandee’s hair.
Yes, her youth had held well. She had the clear skin and unwrinkled brow of a serene thirty-year-old noblewoman. Her wealth of hair was now raven black, with a streak of pure white that ran from her brow all the way back. As she helped Clubfoot sing the choruses, the white band thickened and thinned and thickened.
The Warlock spoke low to Orolandes. “If you see her hair turn sheer white, run like hell. You’re overloaded with that pack. Just get to safety and let me get the others out.” The Greek nodded.
Now the clouds stirred about them. The fitful breeze increased slightly, but not enough to account for the way the mountain was receding. Now the clouds to either side churned, fading or thickening at the edges. Through a sudden rift they watched the farmlands drift away.
“Down there they’ll call this a hurricane. What they’ll call us doesn’t bear mentioning,” Clubfoot chuckled. He walked back to where Orolandes was standing and settled himself in the luxurious softness of a cloud billow. In a lowered voice he said, “I’ve been wrestling with my conscience. May I tell you a story?”
Orolandes said, “All right.” He saw that the others were beyond earshot.
“I’m a plainsman,” said Clubfoot. “My master was a lean old man a lot like the Warlock, but darker, of course. He taught half a dozen kids at a time, and of course he was the tribe’s medicine man. One day when I was about twelve, old White Eagle took us on a hike up the only mountain anywhere around.
“He took us up the easy side. There were clouds streaming away from the top. White Eagle did some singing and dancing, and then he had us walk out on the cloud. I ran out ahead of the rest. It looked like so much fun.”
“Fun,” Orolandes said without expression.
“Well, yes. I’d never been on a cloud. How was a plains kid to know clouds aren’t solid?”
“You mean you never…realized…” Orolandes started laughing.
Clubfoot was laughing too. “I’d seen clouds, but way up in the sky. They looked solid enough. I didn’t know why White Eagle was doing all that howling and stamping.”
“And the next time you went for a stroll on a cloud—”
“Oh, no. Whit
e Eagle explained that. But it must have been a fine way to get rid of slow learners.”
Mirandee was saying, “Do you really think Piranther can’t follow us?”
“There’s no way he can travel this fast on the ground,” said the Warlock. “If he’s in the clouds, we’ll know it. Just as our weather pattern must be fairly obvious to him. Do you see any stable spots in this cloud canopy?”
“No…but there used to be other ways to fly.”
The Warlock snorted. “Used to be, yes.”
Mirandee seemed really worried. “I wonder if you aren’t underestimating Piranther. Warlock, I had occasion to visit Australia not long ago.”
“Mending fences for me?”
“If you like. I thought he might be ready to forget heated words long cooled. He wasn’t.” She gestured nervously. “Never mind that. I saw power. There are roc chicks in that place, baby birds eight feet tall, that breed as chicks and never grow up. Piranther’s people raise them for the eggs! They let children ride on their backs! I watched apprentice magicians duel for sport, with adepts standing by to throw ward-spells. It was like stepping two hundred years into the past. I watched a castle shape itself out of solid rock—”
“And now all the castles are falling down, or so says Piranther. The mana can’t be that high, not if the rocs have turned neotenous. Piranther can’t be as powerful as all of us put together.”
“He’s their leader. The most powerful of them all.”
The Warlock settled his back against a soft billow of cloud. “This place is paradise for a lazy man. Orolandes!” he called.
Orolandes and Clubfoot came chuckling about something. The swordsman let the Warlock put his hands on his head and mutter an ancient spell.
“That should break the link between you and Piranther. Now, Wavyhill, tell us about the last god.”
Orolandes settled himself cross-legged. He felt no different…and he was never going to relax here, despite the infinity of feather bed. But he would not show it either.