The Wide World's End (24 page)

It smelt like a man, in fact—one of these greasy young things standing outside wineshops trying to impress each other and anyone impressionable who happened by.

Ugh. Aloê almost climbed out of her own accord to try another bed. But for all she knew the next would be worse. And she was tired. She hoped her nose would go to sleep with the rest of her.

Deep in the night, she dreamed someone was deep in her. She felt his weight on her, the oily slickness of his hairless chest sliding against her as he thrust himself into her, grunting the way men sometimes do, haloed with cheap musky scent. Her dream-eyes focused on his dream-face in the dream-shadows and she realized he was Naevros syr Tol. And from the glazed expression on his sweaty face he was coming inside her.

Fuck, no!
she wanted to say, and woke up as she was actually coughing out the words.

“Excuse me?” asked Ulvana. Aloê opened bleary eyes to vaguely see Ulvana standing in a doorway filled with morning light.

“Nightmare,” Aloê said thickly.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Absolutely not.” Aloê rolled out of bed, hawked, spat out of a convenient window, and set about her day with a deliberate fury. This was real and that was a dream—and a terrible dream, at that. Somehow the filthy scent in the bed and Ulvana's evening talk about Naevros had mingled in her mind, and the little dreammaker who lived in the basement of her brain had sent that thing up to annoy her. That was all that it was. There was nothing else about it that was real. Nothing.

They breakfasted on salted meat, pickled vegetables, and fresh mushrooms, all fried in oil. It was good, but afterward Aloê drank half her weight in water before she was free of the taste of salt in her mouth. After a minimum of ablutions, she moved with Ulvana toward the garth, where the horses were contentedly awaiting them. Ulvana had watered and fed them when she got up before dawn, and then went looking for mushrooms in the wood. A valuable companion, clearly: Aloê didn't think she could have had better luck, and she told Ulvana so. It was interesting to watch Ulvana blush at the compliment: the embarrassed girl was still alive in there, inside the lumber merchant and Arbiter.

They were travelling up the shining pale stones of the Road much faster than the captive Khnauronts had travelled down them. Before midday they came to another vile campsite. Aloê knew without sniffing around (which did not promise to be one of life's great pleasures, anyway) that this was not the murder scene. They rode on without dismounting.

In midafternoon they came to another of the old camps. Aloê felt the unpleasant sting of insight here. She dismounted and walked some distance from the campsite and the Road, ignoring Ulvana's puzzled query. She lay down on a cold patch of grass and ascended into vision.

It took a timeless time to find it, but she stayed aloft in the visionary state because she knew it was there—she could feel it. Burning with contaminated tal, some drops of blood lay on the ground, wrapped in a shadow of absence that felt like Earno.

She descended to the world that women and men think of as real and lay there on the grass reflecting. The blood was Earno's, shed in his sleep—enough to imprison the shape of his dream self there. And the taint in it. . . . It stank like the spell anchors that they had dug out of his body.

There was not enough blood present for this to be the murder scene. But they were getting closer: Earno's wound had still been fresh when he lay here.

She stood up and walked back to Ulvana. “We ride on,” she said, and they did.

Before nightfall they came to the place itself. Aloê knew before dismounting. They were just beyond the woods, and the tidy heaps of earth covering the Khnauronts' dung stood out clearly against the dry green-gold grass of the plain. Sun and rain had washed away the stink of piss, thank God Avenger.

Aloê dismounted without speaking and walked away from the scene. She sat cross-legged in a field, with her head in her hands, and left her body behind.

The dry, empty field blazed with talic light in her vision: there was life everywhere: grass, bugs, worms, the long shimmering light of the living land itself, life everywhere.

Except
there
.

She drifted toward the clot of darkness in the shining web of light and life. It was another shadow of Earno, haloed here in poisoned blood.

The talic aura of the blood trapped another shadow: Earno's killer. The image was too distorted to be identifiable; it was a twisted shape overlain with many twisted shapes. The murderer had moved around Earno's body as he or she killed him.

The unheard thrum of a binding spell was still in the air. The killer must have spellbound Deor and Earno before beginning the grisly work. When they woke, perhaps they thought they'd had a nightmare.

The murderer would have established the wilderment over the two Guardians and the sentinel mannikins then cut the summoner's throat. The murderer must have quickly sealed up the wounds and established the anchor spell holding the seal. All that was clear. Then the murderer seemed to have spent some time going through Earno's clothes, or fondling his body, or something—their shadows were oddly mingled.

Repelled, Aloê's mind drifted away. She longed to ascend further, lose herself in the bright arc of the living sky. But if she did that, she might never return to her body.

She turned away from her vision, rejecting it and the world full of life's light. She opened her eyes on a coarse void of matter and energy: the real world, as some called it.

Aloê sighed and wearily rose to her feet. It was terrible to lug one's greasy flesh around after one has been floating free between heaven and earth. But that was what life was all about, apparently.

Ulvana had dismounted and was stretching her legs on the field when she caught sight of Aloê returning.

“It was here,” Aloê said in reply to the unspoken but obvious question in Ulvana's eyes.

“Do you want to look around?” Ulvana asked.

Aloê almost answered,
I just did
, but then she reflected that the killer might have left something physical behind. Perhaps a signed letter expressing his intent to kill the summoner or something very helpful of that sort.

In the event, they found nothing, not even a decent set of footprints. It was after dark by the time they stopped looking.

“Let's make camp across the Road,” Aloê said to Ulvana. “I don't like this place. Unless. . . .”

“As a matter of fact,” Ulvana admitted, “I do have a lodge on the edge of the woods. You can see it from here.”

Aloê could not see it from there, in the dim light that was leaving the world as they spoke. But she followed Ulvana's lead, both women leading their horses, and they soon came in sight of a round bark-covered lodge. There was no open garth, but there was a neat little horse barn in back.

Ulvana seemed less happy with the food in this lodge, but Aloê didn't care. The thought of squeezing more mass into her flesh was disgusting to her. She just drank some water from her bottle and staggered off to fall in the nearest bed.

And after a moment leapt out of it cursing. “Chaos bite me on both elbows!”

“What is it?” Ulvana asked, quite concerned.

The bed was polluted with the same greasy musk that had haunted her last night. Did every lumberjack in Easthold use the filthy stuff?

“Not worry,” she said incoherently to Ulvana, and staggered off to another bed.

This, fortunately, only smelled like the sweat of a thousand dead pigs. She drifted off to dreams of murder—one murder after another, all of them committed by a cunning pig in quest of vengeance for the invention of bacon.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Among the Vraids

The dark, spiralling towers of the castle glittered with the force-wefts that held their stones in place. Moving over them, pointing out various features of defense or offense, was Ambrosia's long-fingered hand. Its shadow fell on the blue brightstone trail meant to represent the River Tilion. Ambrosia leaned over the castle in her enthusiasm and invited Morlock to look at details in the courtyard.

But Morlock was stuck on a broader issue. “Is there an island in the river where you're planning to build this?”

“It's worse than that—much worse! There isn't even a river. We'll have to divert it after we dig a decent port some distance away from the Old City of Ontil.”

“What will you call the new city?”

“Ontil, obviously, Morlock. Don't be so dense. We will get people to accept this new empire by pretending it is the old one returned.”

“Which it will not be.”

“Obviously not. Obviously not. We wouldn't want any follies like the Ontilians committed in the Fimbar Dynasty.”

“Er.”

“You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Honestly, brother. You people in the Wardlands never study any history but your own, and since you don't really have any history. . . . What do you do with your time, again?”

“We enjoy dancing and other amusements.”

“I'll bet you do. I'll just bet you do. Go choke on your own elbow, you supercilious son-of-a-bitch, or at least give me some advice on the supports for these walls.”

“Eh.” Morlock looked at the model again. “I've never constructed something on that scale. There's nothing like it in the Wardlands. I'd want Vetr's opinion: he's a good builder; it was his mastery before Oldfather Tyr died.”

“It'll be something new then.”

“Everything in your empire will be new. Except the name.”

“And it won't be
my
empire. These fat-headed Vraids won't accept a woman ruling in her own name.”

“Hm.”

“Don't grunt at me. Do not do that. I'm warning you for the last time.”

Morlock grunted dubiously and then went so far as to add, “But you seem to be ruling it now, while this Lathmar the Old occupies himself with breeding heirs.”

“People tolerate that because it will all come to end when Uthar becomes king. Whichever Uthar it is.”

“I don't understand that.”

“You're not stupid enough, is the problem. If you were it would be obvious that the King of the Vraids must be named Lathmar Utharson or Uthar Lathmarson.”

“It must make their history confusing.”

“They don't really have history, either—just chronicles and myths.”

“In the future, they will have a history.”

“Yes.”

“And it will be of the Second Ontilian Empire—not the Kingdom of the Vraids.”

“Yes.”

“Why not an Empress Ambrosia then?”

“Stop mocking me, Morlock. The fact that you're the only one who would dare do it does not mean that you get to do it all the time.”

Morlock held out his hands and opened them. “I'm not mocking you. I'm saying the future is not the past. That's all.”

“All right, then. Now that I've showed you my toy, tell me about this dragon business again. I don't think I like it.”

Morlock told it to her again.

“Good fortune to you, Prince Uthar. I'm here with Prince Uthar to see Prince Uthar. Could you send Prince Uthar to ask Prince Uthar where Prince Uthar might be?”

“Which Prince Uthar?” asked Prince Uthar.

“Well, there you have me, I'm afraid,” Deor admitted. “This lad and me are supposed to see the Prince Uthar in charge around here. The Regent requires it.”

“Oh,” said the Prince Uthar who was lounging behind the table. “That'll be Uthar-Null Landron.” He turned to a young boy in a gold-worked tunic standing by the door of the booth. “Prince Uthar—”

Kelat drew his stabbing spear. “The next man or dwarf that says the name ‘Uthar' will get this spearblade through his nose. And it you think I'm joking, remember what happened to Magister Harbim.”

The atmosphere in the tent grew perceptibly chillier. The Uthar behind the table lounged more stiffly, at any rate, and glared at Kelat. The Utharling at the door suppressed a snorted laugh.