The Wide World's End (54 page)

“Not his kind of magic,” Morlock agreed.

“Oh,” Deor said, chastened. “Sorry, Ambrosii. How can we tell?”

The Ambrosii looked at the glimmering page, the dark writing on it.

“You're sure that it's Aloê's hand?” Ambrosia said.

“Yes. Aren't you?”

“I wouldn't know, brother. She's never written me a mash note.”

Morlock shouldered off his pack and went through it, pulling out a tablet and stylus. “Show me what you see,” he said.

On the malleable surface, Ambrosia deftly sketched an image of the letter, including the script on its first page.

“That's what I see,” Morlock said. “It is not an illusion. I see no sign of a physical trigger. Is there a talic presence?”

“The whole bridge is a talic presence, brother.”

“Eh. I'm going to open it.”

“Go ahead. I'll remember you as you were.”

Morlock crouched down. Pulling his knife from its sheath on his belt, he used its blade to flip over the first crystalline sheet.

Beloved
, the letter began,
good morning, or whatever time it is when you read this. I have had a bad dream. Unfortunately, it's not the kind I get to wake up from
.

“Aloê wrote this,” Morlock said.

“Good,” Ambrosia said.

“Not really,” Morlock said, and continued reading.

I write you through the agency of the unbeings beyond the northern edge of the world, and at the request of the Graith of Guardians. They ask you to return without attempting the passage of the Soul Bridge or the rescue of the sun.

I'm going to paint you the whole picture. This is going to take a while.

It did. Aloê told him about the conspiracy to murder Earno, and how she had uncovered it, and about Bleys' defense of himself and his colleagues before the Graith.

The Graith acquitted him, I am ashamed to say
, Aloê wrote.
At least it was not unanimous: Jordel spoke at length, which is perfectly usual, and quite seriously, which is perfectly unusual and was doubly impressive because of that. Illion pointed out that the Graith has the obligation to defend and avenge its members, and that it is a tactical as well as moral mistake to allow our murders to go unpunished. Gyrla made a powerful case against trusting Bleys under any circumstances whatever. But, in the end, the Guardians were relieved that something was being done, that something could be done, to protect the Wardlands from the impending death of the world, even if it made them complicit in that death. Bleys and Lernaion are summoners again; Naevros and Bavro have sworn off the Graith. The alliance with the unbeings beyond the world has been affirmed, and Noreê and others from New Moorhope are already working on the magics needed to redraw the border of the sky and separate the Wardlands from the dying world.

The Graith's message to you is this: on pain of exile, you must return and refrain from harming our new allies or interfering with their plot to kill the sun.

My message to you is a little different. Come home now. The greatest danger to the Wardlands is not the dying sun, or the unbeings who would kill it and us, but the Graith itself. There is a cancer in the order, and the great task before us is to cut it out—to break the Graith, if need be, before the freedom of the Wardlands is sacrificed to mere safety. We few who see this need you beside us in that struggle.

Come back to me. I say it like some stupid fisherman's stupid wife. Come back to me.

With love and urgency, I remain

Aloê Oaij, Vocate to the Graith of Guardians

“I have to think about this,” said Morlock.

“Of course,” said Ambrosia. She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it without saying anything.

Morlock turned away from the others and walked along the ragged edge of the world. The wind from the gulf to the north was cold, but no colder than his thoughts.

He had defied the Graith before and returned to honor in its ranks. The Graith was not an army, with military discipline; it was the duty, as well as privilege, for the vocates called to Station to think for themselves, to act in accordance with those thoughts.

But the Graith was changing. He had noticed it himself, and those changes seemed to have gathered momentum in his absence. Aloê thought there was a real risk that he'd be exiled. He had to trust her judgment. If he tried and failed, his life in the Wardlands would be over. What did that leave? Life in the dying world, or escape across the Sea of Worlds to some place he had never known.

And he would be alone. That was clear to Morlock. She said she wrote as a lovesick fisherman's wife, but she didn't, really. She was a Guardian before she was a wife. Her loyalty was to the Wardlands before him.

On the one side, there was a life with Aloê. On the other side was the death of the world.

He thought about the Lacklands and their sparse cannibal denizens, the Vraids on the shores of the Sea of Stones, Danadhar and his Gray Folk in burning Grarby, the master makers under the Blackthorn Range, the frightened, shattered city of Narkunden, all the lands he had seen in Laent, and all the lands he had never seen in and beyond it: all those people, dead in a darkness that would never end.

They would all die someday, it was true, no matter what he did. It was possible that what he was doing was futile anyway. Would he throw away life with Aloê for nothing?

He wondered what he should do. He wondered what he would do.

He looked back at Ambrosia, standing with her head held high on the bridgehead of the Bridge of Souls. It occurred to him that she was afraid; she never bothered to look fearless otherwise.

He walked back to the others. Through the mask, Uthar was staring at him. Deor looked at him and looked away.

“Morlock,” said Ambrosia briskly, “we've talked it over while you were off pondering. Of course, I must go across the Soul Bridge instead of you. Except for the fact that your talic self can bear Tyrfing, that was always the better plan, and I see now it was inevitable. I ask only that you wait here and help the others retrieve my spirit if things get rough on the other side. Your Graith can hardly object to that. Is that acceptable to you?”

“No.”

Half a world away, the Graith stood at Station in their domed chamber. Bleys stood at the Witness Stone, bound and interwoven with the un-object of the Sunkillers. His open eyes were glowing in visionary rapture.

“Ambrosius is walking beyond the world on the Soul Bridge,” he said. “Summon our champion. We must aid our allies.”

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Ghosts and Shadows

“The bridge,” Ambrosia said, “is a means for drawing tal out of the world—perhaps from the sun itself. That was why Skellar found it possible to go out but apparently did not make it back once Rulgân abandoned him.”

Morlock grunted. “I'll say my goodbyes now, then.”

“Shut your stupid face. When you go into vision, wait for me. I'll establish a rapport with you, and we may be able to sustain contact while you pass beyond the world. If we do, I can draw you back.”

“Then.”

Morlock took Tyrfing in his hand and lay down in the snow. He looked at Skellar's eyes, still glowing red beneath the lids, and closed his own. He summoned the rapture of vision.

Slowly, he felt himself rise from his body, his talic self a torrent of black and white flames. Tyrfing rose with him.

A non-word impinged on his awareness: he was aware of Ambrosia's talic presence, a whirlwind of green and gold.

He ascended the Soul Bridge and followed it northward, into and beyond the sky.

Time was hard to gauge, so he didn't. But the bridge grew more solid under his burning feet with each stride he took. That meant there was less matter, more tal. He saw designs in the stones, too—blocks of tal, they must have been, with a smear of matter.

The edge of the sky was like a curtain of darkness. The bridge went on and Morlock with it.

The tal drawn from the sun, from the sky, was all around him. He felt renewed, euphoric, as if he would live forever. He tried to fight the feeling, but it was stronger than he was. He drifted in it, a fire within the fire.

Then the river of tal was gone. All light was gone. He was beyond the world.

With his inner eye he saw everything but understood nothing. He was like a baby just entering the world. Forms had no meaning.

Then something stabbed him. That had a meaning.

He swung toward the threat and brought Tyrfing to guard. He tried to understand what he was feeling. It wasn't pain: his body was on the other side of the sky. But it was a kind of suffering, and a kind he had felt before.

Before him he seemed to see a warrior made of light, armed with a sword made of mist. Then he remembered. He remembered the prison without walls in Tychar, the island surrounded by a lake of mist. When he walked into the mist it rendered him down, somehow . . . broke him up into the components of himself until there was no self anymore. It had been agony. He could not feel pain in his vision, but the distress of unbeing was equally bad.

He remembered the anger and shame he had felt as they had dragged him back to the island, to the prison, to himself.

He dropped the point of his sword and stabbed wildly at the shining warrior.

The warrior's parry was late—perhaps he was surprised. Tyrfing's point didn't strike home, but its harsh blazing edge struck the warrior's bright shoulder and rasped along it.

In his inner ear, Morlock heard a Guardian screaming.

Morlock withdrew to guard and thought.

What was this warrior? Who was this warrior?

He thought he knew. He remembered what Aloê had written in her letter—not to mention the letter itself. The Graith had used their link with the Sunkillers to send her letter to the end of the world, and they must have sent more militant aid by the same route. And who would they send?

It was Naevros—his talic self, anyway—that Morlock was facing.

Morlock held his sword athwart his talic self, then raised it high, then dropped it to guard—a kind of salute.

A fragment of time, and the warrior opposite did the same. He was Naevros. He must be.

And yet. . . . And yet. . . . The shining surface of the warrior, like plate mail forged from glowing glass, was unlike any talic avatar Morlock had ever encountered in vision. And the voice he had heard in his inner ear was not Naevros'. If he had to put a name to it, it would have been Rild of Eastwall.

Were the other Guardians there, in rapport with Naevros, protecting him somehow?

Was Aloê there?

He hoped not, but his choice was made. He dropped his sword to attack; the other parried and riposted with the blade of mist; Morlock circled away from the stroke and stabbed the shining warrior in the side.

A new cry of pain: Vocate Vineion, howling like one of his own dogs. Morlock thought he saw him briefly, peering in pain through the crack on the glowing glass plate.

Naevros spun, struck Tyrfing aside, and lunged. The blade passed through Morlock's talic self again: he saw the black and white flames of his talic being fade into gray lines where the sword of mist had passed.