The Wide World's End (10 page)

“They seem to be much at odds lately.” (She remembered:
They will make that crooked man king someday
. And:
Shut your lying mouth
.)

“The summoners? Indeed. I could almost wish that Bleys were here to step in between them. But the downside would be. . . .”

“That Bleys would be here, yes.” The oldest summoner was loved by few, if any, of his fellow Guardians.

Deor took her to see the captive Khnauronts, in an open field on the far side of the camp. They lay or sat each one alone, and Aloê thought she could see the faint imprint of something unseen in the pale, dry grass around them. Some were sitting upright with folded hands. Others held bowls of soup in their hands, lowering their faces to the liquid and slurping it up like animals. Yet others lay staring at the sky or sleeping.

The field was ringed with spear-armed, gray-caped thains. At a near corner, she saw the Summoner Earno, his legs crossed, his eyes glowing with rapture. Far off, across the field, she could barely descry another white-mantled figure: Lernaion, she supposed.

The wet succulent sounds of slurping were the only ones in the moonlit field.

“Do any of them talk?” she asked Deor.

“They can't!” Deor pointed to his throat. “No, um,
vyrrmidhen
.”

“No larynxes.” How did they communicate with each other? Did they not communicate at all? It was strange indeed. “They will have to be examined on the Witness Stone.”

“So the summoners say.”

Aloê's stomach moved audibly within her.

Deor glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. “Queasy?”

“Hungry,” she admitted. The sounds of the soup-sucking ghouls were indeed disgusting, but the smell of the broth drifting through the cold air was like a breath of meaty heaven.

“God Avenger strike me dead.”

“Avert!” she said automatically. “But do you suppose . . . ?”

“Of course! The Guardians, the Gray Folk, the Silent Folk all have refectories set up. Or we could go under Thrymhaiam.”

“No . . . I should return up the hill to—” Morlock “—the sleephouse.”

“Come in here. We'll get you something better than soup.”

She found herself sitting on a long bench, eating some sort of roasted bird and the most delicious bread since bread was invented. The rest of the hall was dark, and Deor sat beside her, talking cheerily of this and that, eating roasted mushrooms and drinking wine. He persuaded her to drink some of the wine, and the drink might have been a mistake on her part. She was already weary, and the wine sent her right to the edge of sleep. She had little flashes of awareness as Deor half led, half carried her up the long slope to the sleephouse. Then he was tucking her into bed beside the still-snoring Morlock.

“I'm off in the morning with Earno,” he whispered. “If I don't see you then, I'll see you in A Thousand Towers. Be well, and good fortune to you,
harven
.”

“
Harven
,” she muttered, and then he was gone. She wished she had sent a word of goodbye to Earno. She regretted it when she awoke alone, long after noon, and knew they must be gone. She regretted it still more when she realized later that she would never speak to Earno again.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Death of a Summoner

Ten days before he was murdered, Summoner Earno woke with a dry throat and a guilty conscience. The sun was rising over the high Hrithaens to the west. He had told Deor to wake him when the stars spun around to midnight so that he could watch over their charges through part of the darkness. But here it was, deep into day, and he was just waking up.

He shook off his bedroll and leaped to his feet to see Deor standing beside him.

“Don't trouble yourself,
Rokhlan
!” the dwarf said soothingly. “I and the sentinel mannikins watched through the night. The Khnauronts have been fed, and I was just about to make a little breakfast for myself.”

“You should have woken me, my friend. You need rest, too.”

“Yes, but I can sleep while I walk.”

“You—” Earno peered at the dwarvish thain. “In fact? That's not just an expression?”

“In fact. Not day after day, but occasionally I should be able give you a full night's rest. You looked like you needed it last night.”

“Thanks. I did.”

Deor's notion of breakfast always involved hard-boiled eggs and sausage tarts, when they could be procured. Eggs were difficult meat to transport on a walking tour such as theirs, but Deor had packed away a surprising number of sausage tarts in a box lined with a kind of preservative gel. Earno found the tarts inedible when they were fresh, much less when one had to brush off fragments of salty gel. But there was tea and flatbread and broth to be had; they met Earno's modest needs for the present. He thought longingly of a cookhouse near his home in A Thousand Towers: he promised himself a month straight of suppers there when he got home (a promise he would not be able to keep).

Earno did not know he was about to be murdered. He avoided casting mantias or other kinds of foretelling because he was aware of the danger of causal loops, with a prediction effecting itself through his own reaction to the prediction.

But he had not risen to the level of Summoner of the Outer Lands without attaining some depth of insight. And what insight he had was making him restless, very restless, indeed, as if time were running out—for himself, for the people he cared about, for the whole world. And his reason confirmed what his insight was whispering.

He thought of something he could do, something he should have done before leaving the Northhold: warn Morlock of a particular danger. He could write a letter and give it to Deor. That way, even if something happened. . . . He didn't finish the thought. That, too, might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As he herded the pitifully few surviving Khnauronts southward, he composed the letter in his mind. The Khnauronts were completely passive, willing to go anywhere they were directed, and the wardlet woven around them kept them from wandering off the Road. They had a halfmonth left to travel, he guessed, but the Road was clear and straight. He sounded judicious phrases through his mind until he was satisfied with them. When it was time to call a halt for the night, the letter was done: all that remained was to put the words down on paper, and he did that by coldlight during the first watch. By the time he woke Deor for the second watch, the letter was written in dry ink, sealed, and safely tucked away. His conscience was never completely clear, but it was a little clearer as he went to sleep that night.

The fifth day before he was murdered, Earno received a note through the message sock he always carried with him.

The psychic weight of a message sock was not something most were willing to burden themselves with. A sock that had been anchored to a location or a vessel was one thing, but a seer transferring a sock from one place to another had to devote part of his strength to continually sustain the talic
stranj
between locations that allowed the socks to function, so that a note inscribed on the palimpsest attached to one sock was instantly mirrored on the palimpsest of its twin. Earno felt, as summoner, he could not afford to be out of contact with the Graith, so he always carried one, paired to a sock in the Arch of Tidings, back in A Thousand Towers. Lernaion, in contrast, rather enjoyed being inaccessible when it suited him, and Bleys travelled so rarely that the issue hardly ever came up.

The sock message that day was from Noreê. She told about the stranger Kelat whom she had captured, and concluded,
I am coming north to meet you. Keep to the Road
.

Earno read with interest the note on the palimpsest, and laughed when he came to the end. He showed the letter to Deor and said, “Noreê is a fine vocate, but a touch high-handed. Anyway, what would anyone do but keep to the Road? Is there another way south to the city?”

“She is the enemy to my blood,” Deor said flatly, as if that was the limit of his interest in discussing Noreê. This choked off a possible line of conversation between them, and they spent most of that day in silence as Earno meditated on the burden of long hates, such as Noreê had for the Ambrosii, or the dwarves had for Noreê. Was it a weakness in him that he could not hate so long and steadily? Once he had done so. He could hardly regret it: the exile of Merlin and Earno's ascent to the rank of summoner were the result. But nowadays he liked most people he knew. He appreciated their oddness. He felt himself to be quite ordinary, perhaps too ordinary.

On the morning after he had been murdered, Earno Dragonkiller, Summoner of the Inner Lands, awoke with a searing headache and a bad taste in his mouth. He coughed up a clot of red-black phlegm and spent a shocked moment staring at it as it lay glistening like jelly in his hand.

“What's that?” his friend Deor syr Theorn wondered. “Breakfast?”

“Blecch,” muttered Earno and wiped his hand on the dry, brown grass.

They saw to it that their charges had something to eat and drink, and then breakfasted themselves. Earno's bacon and porridge had a difficult time making its way down his throat. There was a soreness there, a swelling, and nothing tasted right. He scraped his bowl out on the ground, packed it away, and started the task of herding their charges through another day.

The wardlet around the prisoners was choosy about who or what it let past. That was convenient in preventing runaways. It was inconvenient when the Road passed through a wood. Sometimes they had to broaden the way, with Earno or Deor lopping limbs off trees while the other watched the prisoners in case they made a collective run for freedom (though they seemed disinclined to do so).

Earno found this work interesting: he rarely got to work with his hands anymore. But it was not very interesting; nothing was, somehow. He thought about the porridge and bacon he had failed to finish that morning. Worth killing for? Worth dying for? (Earno did not doubt that the Graith would decide to kill the captured invaders.)

The whole day was like that damn porridge: more than he wanted; a little difficult to get down.

The second day after he had been murdered went a little easier. Eating was a chore, but no longer a pain. And before they had walked long in the morning, they were joined by Noreê, who true to her word, had ridden up from A Thousand Towers to see if they needed any help.

It was interesting, but not very interesting, to hear Deor and Noreê spar with frosty courtesies. It was interesting to taste the relief he felt when the responsibility for the prisoners was shared by another Guardian. Their future deaths had been weighing heavily on Earno's mind (not that he thought that they deserved to live, just that the delay was a little wearing, a little wearing). The horse she rode was interesting: a gray palfrey all the way from Three Hills.

But not very interesting. Something had gone out of the world, some flavor or color that gave intensity to life, and Earno wasn't sure what it was.

On the fourth day after he had been murdered, Earno almost felt himself again. Whatever had afflicted him was nearly past, he felt—and that was true, although he didn't know what it was. He was borrowing Noreê's gray palfrey to see if he could put it through its paces. He looked up and saw Morlock and Aloê riding toward him, on the other side of a narrow stream, tributary to the River Ruleijn.

Morlock rode even more awkwardly that Earno did, and that almost made the old summoner smile. When he saw Morlock he was always reminded simultaneously of the proudest and most shameful times in his life, and somehow that made him almost smile as well. He didn't feel much of anything these days; he had borne the burden of a great secret so long he could hardly feel it, or anything, anymore. But it was a comfort to remember that he had once felt so intensely; it gave him hope he would do so again. The thought of sharing his secret, sharing the burden, was also a relief.

They were smiling at him, raising their left hands in greeting. He raised his own in response, and now he did smile. He urged the gray palfrey forward and it stepped down into the middle of the stream and stopped, the water foaming below the horse's knees.

Something was wrong. Morlock and Aloê were looking at him, eyes wide with shock. There was a warmth, a wetness running down his neck and chest, staining his white tunic red, mingling with the coarse gray hair of the horse's mane. He heard himself gulp air, although his mouth was closed. He reached up to feel the rough, blood-spewing, lipless mouth that gaped in his throat.

Then he fell from the horse's back into the clear, cool water.

At last, in the last moment, it returned, that strange bittersweetness, the tang of life, of really feeling and being. The bright, crystalline color of the mountain stream, the taste of his own blood in his mouth. He was alive again, wholly alive. Then, on the fourth day after he was murdered, Earno died.