The Wide World's End (14 page)

Kelat simply screamed and screamed without words.

Morlock jumped up on the dais next to the Stone and the screaming stranger.

Kelat's crazed eyes fixed on Morlock and his sword. “Kill me!” he begged. “It's in me! Inside of me! It hurts so much! Oh, Death and Justice, kill me now!”

Morlock, no particular friend to Death or Justice said, “No.” He struck Kelat strategically on the side of the head and the stranger fell from the dais to the floor. Morlock jumped down to make sure he hadn't broken his neck in the fall and was relieved to find he was still breathing.

Next to the dais, Bleys was weeping over the fragments of the Witness Stone like a child whose favorite toy has been broken. “Why did you do it?” the summoner sobbed. “Do you know what you've done? Do you know what's been lost? To save the life of an invader, an outsider, mere bait in a trap, you have destroyed long ages of accumulated wisdom!”

Morlock looked down at the groveling old man with a mixture of pity and contempt. “The trap will lead us to the trapper, Bleys. And if this is the last age of the world, your accumulated wisdom will disperse in darkness anyway. Look to the stranger! Don't let him die or awake again.”

Morlock ran around the long oval of the dais until he reached Aloê. She was slumped across the Long Table, her limbs spasming wildly. Naevros was already standing over her, but he stood back as Morlock approached. Morlock vaulted onto the dais and picked his wife up in his arms.

Her eyes were open but wild. Her limbs were still thrashing, like a baby who hasn't learned how to use her arms and legs. On her throat were dark handprints, and on one he saw a deeper cross-mark: the imprint of the ring on her finger, the ring he had made for her.

He wondered if he should go into vision and try to search for her spirit. Who could advise him? Illion, Noreê, and Lernaion were as bad as this or worse. Bleys was babbling like a dotard. Earno was dead. . . .

Aloê's golden eyes focused on him.

“Crazy bastard!” she whispered hoarsely, and bit him on the upper arm.

Then he knew that all would be well.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Evening in A Thousand Towers

Stations of the Graith did not normally end with most of its members being examined by binders from the Skein of Healing, but this had been an odd one. It was necessary to know that there was no lingering dragonspell in those who kept the Guard. Many had bruised throats to look after as well, but no one had been fatally injured.

“And I, for one, am disappointed,” remarked Jordel, lounging with calculated nonchalance on a window ledge in Tower Ambrose, where the recently set sun still lit the sky behind him with chilly red. “All these great warriors,” Jordel complained, “and not one had a grip strong enough to break his own throat.”

Baran, his brother, sitting on a couch nearby, grunted. “Neither did you.”

“I know!” Jordel said, pointing at his heavily bruised skin. “I'm deeply ashamed!”

“We're all ashamed of you, J,” Aloê responded from a nearby chair. “Though not all for the same reasons.”

“I'll do better next time,” Jordel promised.

After the Station broke up in chaos, Lernaion had led the vocates who openly belonged to his faction away to some sort of private meeting. The members of Bleys' faction, in contrast, were still consoling their leader, sobbing over the broken Witness Stone. Noreê and Illion had put a wilderment on the dragon-haunted stranger, Kelat, and conducted him to one of the nearby Wells of Healing for purposes they did not say. The remaining vocates not aligned with any summoner's faction had scattered to their own places of refuge.

One of these was Tower Ambrose, where the group of friends and peers Jordel called “the Awkward Bastards” frequently resorted after a Station. There were some of the usual faces missing: Thea, who would never be seen again, and Illion. But Jordel and Baran were there, and Naevros and Keluaê Hendaij and a few others. The tower's staff had all gone home for the night, so Morlock and Deor were down in the kitchen whomping up something like a meal.

Aloê sat, wrapped in her red cloak, in the chair that had always been Thea's when she visited, and listened more than she talked. She had a sense that something was ending—the world, of course, was growing colder, and everything was very bad. But the thing she feared, and part of her longed for, was standing nearer than the end of the wide world outside these walls. She could not say what it was, and did not wish to. But she could think about nothing else.

Three pairs of footfalls grew closer: the long, steady stride of her husband; his
harven
-kin Deor's quicker, shorter steps; and a third, the wooden strokes of the Walking Shelf.

The three entered in that order, to general cheering. The Awkward Bastards were hungry—hungry enough that there had been serious talk of walking down to the Speckles, the infamous rusty-ladle cookshop just a few hundred steps down the River Road. The scents and sights carried in by the Walking Shelf were enough to banish such thoughts forever.

“Please hold your applause to the end!” Deor said. “This may not be up to Tower Ambrose's usual level of catering. You don't know the meaning of danger until you've worked in a kitchen with Morlock.”

Morlock shrugged and said, “Walking Shelf, go: offer trays to people.”

The brass eye atop Walking Shelf revolved in a circle and then the shelf stumped over to Jordel. It grabbed a tray off the shelves in its interior and offered it to him.”

“All the trays are the same,” Deor said apologetically. “Fell free to swap around whatever you don't want.”

“It's like school,” said Keluaê to Naevros, who smiled suavely. There had been no school in the three-boat port town where Naevros grew up, Aloê knew, but she doubted that Keluaê could tell. Naevros could handle any conversation—except the ones that mattered most. He was a mirror image of Morlock, who never seemed to be able to speak unless the conversation was a matter of life or death. Often she wished she could make one whole man out of their scattered traits, and not only in this context.

Morlock served out wine, red or white, whereas Deor busied himself with the tea urn. When Walking Shelf had given everyone a tray, Morlock said, “Walking shelf, go: stand in a corner.” It looked around with its brass eye, stumped over to the nearest corner, and stood still.

Morlock had a tray of his own by that time and a mug of tea. He came and sat on the floor next to Aloê. He knew why she was sitting there, of course. She reached out the hand she wasn't eating with and tangled it in his crazy hair. She saw Naevros looking, saw him look away. She didn't bother to stop on his account. She had made her choice, the right choice, a century ago.

There was contented semisilence for a while, as the Guardians slew their hunger with weapons of food and drowned their thirst in oceans of drink.

“Morlock,” said Sundra Ekelling after a time, “you
are
the master of all makers.”

“Injustice!” sputtered Deor. “In the kitchen,
I
am the master. Eight parts of what you are eating is my work, and one of the others is either underdone or overdone.”

“You lay wonderful eggs, Deor,” Jordel remarked.

“You may laugh, Vocate, but laying an egg is relatively easy compared to cooking it properly—neither seared paste nor raw, slippery glook.”

“Whoever made these wonderful little filled flushcakes has my eternal gratitude,” Sundra said.

“Oh. Well. I suppose they're not so bad. Those
are
Morlock's, to tell the truth. Master of all makers of pancakes, you should call him. But apart from that: what a menace! Morlocktheorn, won't you have some wine?”

So Deor had noticed that, too. It was a little thing, but connected to the deep fear within her.

Morlock shook his head: he would drink no wine.

Deor persisted: “If you don't like the ones we brought up I could run and get you something else from the cellar. We have some golden Plyrrun, from that sunny island off the coast of Southhold. Salty and sweet and refreshing all at once. Or Barkun, from Westhold. That's a fine, bold red wine.”

“No, Deortheorn,” Morlock said. “The day's work isn't done. I never drink while I'm working.”

“There!” shouted Deor. “I made you say it! Go on, then, Morlock: what's your evening's work, and how many precious talismans of the Graith's magical armory will it destroy?”

“Deor,” Naevros said mildly, “give the man a rest. We all had a long, bitter day.”

Deor's flat, gray face looked wounded. “It's him that doesn't want to rest. I meant no criticism of my senior in the Order—” he rolled his eyes at this “—and in Theorn Clan.” He did not roll his eyes. “I enjoy breaking things, personally, and it is many hours before I must sleep. Come on, Morlock!”

Morlock shook his head. “Thinking now,” he said. “Talk later.”

“This may take a while, then,” Jordel said. “These people who are particular about thinking always take so long to choose their words! Now, me, I never bother to think before I talk, which reminds me of the time—”

He was instantly pelted with rolls, bits of stray bread, and catcalls.

“I'm going to ignore that,” he said, “partly because I know you don't mean it, and partly because your suffering is to me merely the butter on this delicious bread. This was back when—you'll remember this, Naevros—”

Jordel's stories at their best—and this was a pretty good one—required audience participation: cries of disgust or disbelief, exclamations of confirmation or denial, alternate versions of events in more temperately colored prose, occasional doses of applause. It served Jordel's end of making everyone forget their troubles—except Morlock, who sat eating and drinking his damned tea and thinking, thinking, thinking.

They were sitting in the roseate aftermath of Jordel's ridiculous anecdote when Illion appeared in the doorway, his apple-nosed jester's face looking unwontedly serious.

“I tried to ring the bell,” he said, in apology, “but this big eye just opened in the door, and then the door opened to let me in. I thought it was really weird, and I want one.”

They shouted for him to come in, and they got him a cup of wine. They were going to make up a tray for him out of their leavings, but Walking Shelf woke up when he came in, reached inside itself and brought forth from a hidden warming box a tray for Illion. It stumped over and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” Illion said to it bemusedly.

“Walking Shelf, go: go back to the corner,” said Deor in a singsong voice, then he glanced at Morlock. “So you were right. How did you know Illion was coming?”

“I didn't know,” said Morlock, “but I did ask him to.”

“I'm glad you did,” said Illion, perching on a chair and setting down his food and drink on a nearby table. “The hospitality of Tower Ambrose is strangely excellent and excellently strange.”

“Like the compliments of Illion the Wise,” Jordel said wryly.

“Let him eat! Try the rolled flatcakes, Illion. They're good.”

Illion ate and drank, and the conversation became general. Morlock didn't partake in it unless someone addressed him in particular, and then he answered as briefly as possible. He got up to pour himself some more tea, then came back to sit by Aloê and drink it. He was waiting.

Eventually Illion pushed away his food, accepted a refill of wine, and turned to Morlock. The waiting was over. “Listen,” he said, “why did you break the Stone rather than kill Kelat? Either would have broken the hostile rapport.”

“Something in him,” Morlock said.

“There was, and it was still in contact with Rulgân. You have no doubts about who the speaker was?”

“None.”

“Well. I didn't say so earlier, but: good work, Guardian. My throat thanks you, from the bottom of my heart.”

Morlock opened his free hand and waited.

Illion sighed and drew something from his pocket. It was like a gem, the kind often used as a focus of power. It looked like a white diamond veined with red ruby. “Here it is,” he said. He tossed it to Morlock.

Morlock held it up to the light, and thought, and said nothing. Aloê watched him.

“You cut it out of his
brain
?” Deor asked. “Is he dead? Oh, of course he is.”

“No,” Illion said, “he didn't die. Not permanently, anyway. We sealed his brain, his skull, and his skin and Noreê took him off to the lockhouse in the west side where the surviving Khnauronts are being kept.”

“Will he die?” Morlock asked.

Illion shrugged and drank. “We all will, Morlock.”

“Some sooner than others, if that icy witch has her way,” Deor remarked. “Telling truths, Guardians,” he said when some protested.

“Is he sane?” Morlock asked Illion.

“Yes. He remembers things about his life, for instance, that he didn't before. He'll remember more, in time. And we inscribed a protection against dragonspell in kharnum letters on his naked skull, so he won't fall prey to that trap again.”