The Wide World's End (3 page)

It displeased Noreê that this meeting occurred in Tower Ambrose, which had bad memories for her. But she never let personal discomfort prevent her from doing what she thought of as her work. And the world's weather these days was her work—a threat to the Wardlands even greater than a thousand Ambrosii, or so she feared. In any case, she knew she would spend very little time inside her body while that body was in Ambrose.

She stood now in the sky over the Sea of Stones, a thousand miles away from her body. Normally, visionary rapture so extreme would result in physical death. But her friends had interwoven their psyches with hers, and they stayed more firmly anchored to their bodies, barely in rapture. Their strength, their collective anchor, strengthened and anchored her voyaging mind. What she did now was dangerous enough, but something short of certain death. And it was utterly necessary.

She saw mostly by not seeing. Her vision in rapture was a perception of living things, or at least potentially alive things implicit with tal. But what she was looking for was death, the absence of life or the elements of life, a black river in the sky with many tributaries from all over the world.

Its source was deep in the north—all the way to the end of the wide world, or so she suspected. It remained tantalizingly, painfully just beyond her scope of vision. If she extended herself farther, still farther. . . . What was distance to the soul? Nothing.

But it was something to the body, and she knew that if her body and soul were not to part company she must not go farther; she must turn back. After a timeless time, contemplating the ice-dark river of death inundating the world, she did retreat.

There was a comfort in turning away from the stark smiling skeleton of the dying world, to cover herself with warm flesh like a blanket, to settle for being herself and only herself again.

She opened her eyes and met the golden gaze of Aloê, who smiled a slow, worried smile in response. “You took a long time to wake up.”

“I was. I was a long way away from myself,” Noreê replied, her tongue feeling as thick and about as flexible as a plank of wood.

Aloê rang for tea; it was brought by a beardless dwarf Noreê thought might be a female. She had a strong distaste for dwarves, but she strove to never display or act on that emotion. She thanked the server and sipped her tea in silent companionship with her fellow Guardians.

“Do you think it's getting worse?” Aloê said, after part of an hour, at exactly the moment Noreê was ready to speak. Her intuition was powerful, subtle, enviable.

“Yes,” Noreê replied. “The world's weather is growing colder. The life of the sun is being drained by something in the deep north.”

“Will the Wards protect us?” Thea asked.

“For a time. For a time. But there is something there, preying on the sun.”

“Someone will have to go and do something about that,” Thea said.

They all nodded and talked about the details of their separate visions.

Presently Thea looked out the window and said, “Your men are home, Aloê.”

“I only have the one.”

“Oh. Well, Morlock is with him.”

Aloê reached over to yank gently on Thea's nose, then got up from the couch they were sharing to shout out the window at the men.

Noreê drank her tea with slow deliberation. She would have enjoyed talking with Thea and Aloê some more, but now she would leave as soon as possible. She disliked how other women, even fairly intelligent women, often became twittery in the presence of men. Not all women, of course, but Aloê and Thea were apparently not among the exceptions.

Now the heavy unmatched footfalls of the two men were ascending the stairs outside the room. Her cup was dry, the teapot was empty, and she had the distinct impression she had missed several remarks by Thea and Aloê. No matter. These brief fugues often occurred in the wake of extended rapture; everyone knew about them, and that knowledge might help mask her distaste.

Now the men had entered the room, and Aloê put her lovely mouth, lips like dark rose petals, on the scarred face of that pale, crooked man. Not perfunctorily, either, but hungrily, as if it were a half-baked pastry and she was going to eat it. Disgusting.

Naevros stood aside, a patient smile on his face, and waited until Aloê turned her golden gaze on him. Then he stood imperceptibly taller, smiled imperceptibly broader. If most women were fools for men, most men were equally foolish for women, even if they didn't like them much. Noreê didn't listen to what they were saying; it couldn't possibly matter. These people had spent a century never saying what they really meant, until it wasn't even necessary to say it anymore.

Now Thea was chiming in; greetings, apologies on Noreê's behalf, yes, yes. Now they started talking about the vision. Noreê was interested to hear Aloê and Thea's account of it. Of course, most of what they said was quotation from her, right down to her assertion that “there is something there, preying on the sun.”

And echoing Thea, Morlock said, “Someone will have to go see about that.”

“Not you,” said Noreê and Aloê in the same instant, surprising each other and everyone else.

“Why not?” Morlock asked, saluting Noreê with a mugful of tea. Her own cup was half full again. Perhaps she was really coming out of it, now. But she chose not to answer. She rarely spoke directly to young Ambrosius, never without regretting it.

Aloê said lightly, “Thea is already going. You don't want to steal her thunder.”

“I suspect there'll be plenty of thunder to go around,” Thea said dryly. “Let's talk it over when you're back in town again, Vocate,” she said directly to Morlock.

“Couple months,” Morlock said. “Maybe three.”

“A halfmonth on the southeast coast, a halfmonth in and under the Northhold,” Aloê said, “plus travel time.”

“Soon enough,” Thea said. “It'll be spring by then, with summer before us.”

But what if you never see another summer?
wondered Noreê. It was a cold thought from a cold future.

She sat there, drank tea almost as cold as her thoughts, and tried to pretend interest in what the others said.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Knife

Two months and some days later, on the twenty-fifth of Drums, in the cozy red gloom of their shelter, Aloê Oaij said to her husband, “I dreamed you were suspended between heaven and earth. Then flying knives pierced your body and all four of you fell. That's how it always ends. I've had the dream dozens of times since the new year.”

“Eh.”

Aloê was bitten by a century-long, never-slumbering annoyance. She sat up in her sleeping cloak and said, “That's all you have to say? Really?”

Morlock Ambrosius shrugged. “There are not four of me. I don't see how that dream can be significant.”

“Noreê says it is.”

Morlock was silent for a time. Finally he said, “She probably thinks there
are
four of me. Under her bed.”

“You should stop napping there.”

In reply, Morlock flipped a snowball at her. She fell over squawking, “Where did you get that?”

“It snowed again last night.”

Aloê dodged out of the warm, fire-edged darkness of the occlusion into the fresh-blazing air of a snow-covered morning. She laboriously made a pair of snowballs (it was not a skill she had learned at her mother's knee in the Southhold) and then shouted into the occlusion, “Come out and fight! Aroint thee, dastard! If that means what I think it does!”

Aloê felt the impact of a snowball on her shoulder. Morlock had taken advantage of her concentration to sneak out of the shelter. She turned and smote him hip and thigh with flying, fragmented snow (her snowballs tended to come apart in midair), and from there it was a tangle of confusion where snow weapons gave way to hand-to-hand combat and, eventually, some uncomfortable but enthusiastic sex in a snowbank—a first, in Aloê's experience.

They repaired shivering to the welcome warmth of the occlusion and its dim red hotlight.

“After a hundred years of marriage, you still surprise me sometimes,” Aloê said wryly, as they scrambled into dry clothes.

He smiled and pointed at her. She was left guessing what he meant by that—a feeling that did not surprise her, unfortunately.

Morlock packed up while Aloê unmade the occlusion. The icy bite of the unseasonably cold spring air was not as unpleasant as she had feared: maybe it was a good idea to start the day with a snowball fight and some frosty muckling. More experimentation was needed to confirm, she decided.

The snowfall wasn't deep enough to necessitate snowshoes, but it was deep enough to slow them down a bit. The day was half-gone before they reached the Shaenli farmstead, their usual last stop before ascending the Whitethorns through the Whitewell Vale.

When they got there, she found herself wishing they'd skipped it this time.

The farmhouse was burnt down to its timbers—a charcoal sketch of a farmhouse on the paperwhite landscape.

The farm animals and people were gone. But not all gone: what was left of them was bones—shattered marrowless bones covered with teethmarks.

“What happened here?” she asked Morlock.

“I think they made soup. There's the remains of a fire over there by the bone heap, and supports for a cauldron.”

“That's not what I mean. Who did it? Why did they do it?”

“They came from the unguarded lands, I guess. Times have been hard there.”

“
This
hard?”

Morlock shrugged and turned away. He poked with a stick in a couple of different places, brushing away the snow.

“Think they came that way,” he said at last, pointing toward the Gap of Lone. “Maybe left to go up the Whitewell, into the Northhold.”

Aloê had already drawn both those conclusions. “And so . . . ?”

“Something must have happened at the Gray Tower,” Morlock said. “One of us should go there. The other should head north to bring warning to the peoples of Northhold.”

“Well, would you like to flip for it?”

“I think I should go north, because—”

“Sh. I was joking. I'll collect what survivors I can from the Gray Tower and follow you north. Or maybe I'll take Grynidh's Underroad westward,” she added reluctantly. “I should be able to raise some help from around Three Hills.”

Morlock shot a gray glance at her. He knew how much she hated travelling on Grynidh's Underroad—miles of which were underground, hence the name. But he said nothing. What was there to say? If invaders were making soup out of the Guarded, she would have to put up with a little claustrophobia or stop calling herself a Guardian.

“Get along with you, then,” she said.

He walked over, held her, kissed her, and walked away. He half ran in a springing long-legged stride that let him hop over the snow rather than slog through it.

She tried to imitate it as she went eastward. But, like so much he did, it was irritatingly inimitable, and she settled for slogging.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

Red and Gray

Along the trackless way leading to the Gray Tower, Aloê passed signs of the intruding enemy. She found another site of a cannibal soup-feast, scattered with gnawed broken bones that could only be from men and women; the blanket of new snow made it seem more innocent and more horrible than the other. She saw the intact skeleton of a unicorn: they had somehow managed to kill it and strip its flesh, but its bones had proved unbreakable. No animals remained in the destroyers' wake, not even scavengers.

She dreaded what she would find at the Gray Tower. She had spent happy months there as a thain, a long time ago now, and some useful ones more recently as a vocate. The memory of the tower said safety to her, as few places did. But now she suspected everyone there had been slaughtered and eaten. It was the only way to explain how the invaders had gotten so deep into the Wardlands without being stopped or, it seemed, even followed.