The Wide World's End (49 page)

The weather had been as monotonous as the road north: clear and cold. He wondered if this was the first blast of an ice storm . . . but the sky was cloudless; the silver sun glittered on the ice, almost an arch, or a. . . . There were scales or something on the arch. . . .

Liyurriu snarled and ran forward, but it was too late: the gigantic ice-dragon's tail slammed down and trapped the Ambrosii and Deor beneath it.

The werewolf ran on. Kelat threw off his pack and ran after him, drawing his spear as he went.

The ice dragon's gigantic wolflike head slithered into view. It was almost impossible to see its glassy outlines against the white snow. But Kelat could see hollow fangs that dripped with something like venom. . . .

Liyurriu had closed with the dragon's head and seemed to fly up into the air. Then Kelat realized the werewolf was climbing something—some feathering, or icy plates on the side of the serpentine head.

He kicked off his snowshoes and leaped for the same—hoping it was there rather than actually seeing it. He landed a foot or two off the ground, sliding across a piece of nearly invisible ice, leaving scars from his cleated boots. He jumped at the next feather, and the next, until he was beside Liyurriu in the back of the thing's gleaming, surprisingly narrow neck.

It was ware of them, and the head began to twist around. That was good because it was turning away from their companions, still trapped under the tail. It was also bad because they nearly fell off. Liyurriu and Kelat both grabbed for the nearest dorsal plate and managed to hang on.

The werewolf put his misshapen jaws to the back of the glassy neck and gnawed at it.

Kelat saw his purpose. Break through the scaly skin—sever the spine. If it was like dragons of a more familiar kind, that might kill it.

A jet of translucent shining ichor sprayed out of the dragon. Liyurriu tried to dodge aside but could not. The jet fell across his foreleg and it shattered like glass. Liyurriu fell silently away, and the task was left to Kelat.

He could see no other method than Liyurriu's, nor did he expect any different fate than Liyurriu's. That didn't bother him. It was wonderful, after a lifetime of being a spare part that no one would ever want, to know his purpose in life: he was born to love Ambrosia, and to die defending her.

What did worry him was the thought that he might fail. He must not fail.

He stabbed with his spear deep into the ice-dragon's neck, dancing away from the jet of freezing ichor and steam that sprayed out. Then he did it again and again. The jets were smaller, easier to avoid, flowing through the several holes he had made. He cut a channel between them, and the deadly muck flowed away thickly down the side of the beast.

There was a strange weightless sensation, as if he were flying. Then he saw that he was: the dragon's head was in midair. The beast was lifting itself up, perhaps to crash its head down and shake him loose. If so, he had moments, perhaps only a moment.

He stabbed into the glassy trench he had made, as near the center of the neck as he could tell, as deep as he could drive the spear's blade. And he struck! He struck something.

His hands, drenched in ichor, were numb and void of feeling. But they still gripped the shaft of his spear. He drew it out and stabbed again and again and again. The dragon's head struck the snowy ground and the shock threw him off it.

He tried to get to his feet, but his body would not respond. He saw that the spear-shaft in his hand was broken a handsbreadth below where his hands still gripped it.

He craned his neck to look at the ice-dragon. It was lying near at hand in a steaming pool of its own glassy ichor. Its eyes were open, filled with rainbows in the sun's pale light. But it wasn't moving. He guessed it was dead.

Ambrosia came running up to him.

“You stupid son-of-a-whore!” she screamed. “I'll kill your stupid, noseless face!”

That was when he knew that she loved him. It was terrible to lose her, and the world that was suddenly his, in that moment. But the knowledge was something he could carry with him into the darkness, and he hugged it close to him as his awareness ebbed away.

When Morlock dragged himself out from beneath the dead ice-dragon, he heard Ambrosia screaming and got up to run toward her. But he was stopped by the sight of Liyurriu's body, shattered like a clay figurine, past all repairing.

Its eyes were open, though, and they were on Morlock.

“Shall I sever your life?” he asked, drawing his deadly dark sword.

“You forget,” said a voice, speaking flawless Wardic through Liyurriu's unmoving jaws, “that this body is not truly alive. It will be no more use to you and yours, Ambrosius, and I plan to abandon it.”

“Then.”

“Good luck at the end of the world, Ambrosius. I will know you if we meet again. But you won't know me.” The voice laughed a little through the werewolf's deformed, unmoving jaws. Then the wolvish eyes closed and Liyurriu was silent forever.

Morlock looked about and saw that Deor was already with Ambrosia by Kelat's fallen body. He strode over and said, “Dead?”

“No,” Ambrosia said tonelessly. The focus-jewel hanging from her neck was glowing, as were her closed eyes. “Help me.”

Kelat's hands and forearms were bone-white with frost, as was his left leg. There was no doubt what help Ambrosia wanted: she must be concentrating the heat in his body on those frozen areas, thawing them out before they died.

He lay down in the snow and summoned deep vision as fast as he was able. If Kelat could be saved, time was their enemy.

Kelat awoke to the cheery light of a fire flickering on the shelter walls.

That was odd. But it was pleasing. He thought he would never see fire again. He thought he would never see anything again.

He tested his hands. They ached unbearably, but he could move them. His leg, too.

“Oh, you'll live to fight another dragon someday, if that's what you're worrying about, Prince Uthar,” he heard Deor remark.

Kelat lifted his head. “Name's Kelat.”

“Yes, but Ambrosia suggested we start calling you Uthar instead. It's all those other Uthars who'll have to change their names, from the sound of things.”

Kelat considered this in silence. It seemed rather momentous, but in a distant way. Being alive—and not seeing his arms and leg go the way of his nose—all that seemed more important, was certainly more immediate.

Morlock and Ambrosia were lying still on opposite sides of the fire. Their eyes were not lit up with vision. They were just sleeping.

Kelat gestured at the fire. “What . . . ? What . . . ?”

“My pack,” Deor said. “It was almost empty anyway, so I'll distribute what's left among the other three. The seers are out, as you see, and we have to get through the night somehow. I had some fun designing the occlusion so that the smoke departs but most of the heat remains—but I suppose you don't care about that.”

“Keeps me alive. I care.”

“Some food will help, too. I was all for making werewolf sausages out of that dead meat-puppet, but Morlock seemed to think the meat might not be healthy.”

“Ugh.”

“Well, that
was
what he actually said. I take it you agree. You want a mouthful of flatbread and dried meat? It's what we've got, so that's kind of a rhetorical question.”

“Water more.”

Deor unfolded a flatware bowl and got him some melted snow.

“We're going to make it, I think,” Deor said to him while he drank. “I didn't think so before.”

“Make it a while longer,” said Kelat. He tried to think of himself as Uthar. He was still thinking about it when he fell asleep.

They did make it.

One pale, unremarkable morning they ate the last crumbs of their food and struck their shelters. They trudged up a steep ridge and, at the top, looked all the way down to forever: the wintry sky of that harsh summer faded to a misty blue like evening below. The land ran raggedly up to the edge of the sky and stopped. At the very end of the world, the winds from beyond the edge had scoured the stone free of snow.

But they no longer needed the track of the sun's death in the snow to lead them. There, on the blue-black stone at the ragged edge of the world was a bridgehead. Beyond it a bridge extended in a long, curving arch beyond the eye's ability to follow: paving stones black and white gave way at some indefinable point to patches of light and darkness.

“The Soul Bridge,” Ambrosia remarked.

Morlock nodded. There was nothing else it could be: the bridge the Sunkillers had made to invade the world, the way Skellar had been sent beyond the sky by Rulgân.

They saw no one there at or near the bridge, but their enemies were not material entities. Morlock kicked off his much-repaired snowshoes and drew Tyrfing, which was also not a material entity (or at least not merely material). He strode down the far side of the ridge and walked up to the bridgehead, Ambrosia at his side, the others close behind.

As he got closer, he did see someone or something: a vaguely manlike body, half-buried in snow, sprawled next to the bridgehead.

“Skellar,” he called over his shoulder.

Ambrosia grabbed Morlock by the elbow. He turned to look at her. She was in rapture, eyes closed and faintly glowing, the focus-amulet at her throat throbbing with pulses of light.

The light faded. She opened her eyes.

“Then?” he said.

“The body is not dead, but neither is it the residence of a soul any longer. There is nothing else alive between here and the edge of the sky except us—and except that.” She pointed at the Soul Bridge.

He grunted. “Alive?”

“It is tal interwoven with matter, like your blade Tyrfing there. Or, for that matter, like you.”

“Odd, but not unexpected. What's troubling you?”

“That.” She pointed at something on the first step of the bridgehead: sheets of crystal, pinned with something like ice to the stone. There was dark writing on the crystal in a language that he knew, by a hand that he recognized.

It was a letter. And it was addressed to him.