The Wide World's End (56 page)

Then the moment passed and the bolt of light from beyond the end of the world spread out into the sky above, and Deor heard his voice laughing. It was a kind of light, pleasant cold, like on Cymbalsday morning. That was a traditional day for snowball fights, so he made a snowball and hit Kelat in the face with it.

The Vraidish prince shook the snow off his mask and laughed. He grabbed some snow and replied in kind. His aim would have been perfect if Deor had been even five feet tall, so the dwarf took the precaution of ducking behind a snowy hill before the Vraid struck again.

Deor looked around, hoping to enlist Ambrosia and Morlock in the ongoing snowfight.

Morlock's body still lay beside Skellar's on the bridgehead at the end of the world. The bridge beyond was gone, shattered by the freed sunlight.

Deor dropped the snowball he was making and ran over to where Ambrosia was kneeling beside her brother.

She turned her face toward Deor. Her eyes were closed and he could see her blue irises shining through the thin skin of the eyelids. She was still aloft in rapture. She spoke, in the toneless voice of the enraptured, “He is falling through the void. There is no here, there is no there. Falling. Many are lost, but he is not lost yet. I am losing him. I am losing him. Help me. Deor. Uthar. Help. . . .”

“Kelat!” shouted Deor, and the Vraid was there, his brown eyes wide with concern.

“I don't know what to do,” Deor said to Ambrosia.

She lifted her hands blindly, trapped in her vision. “Your strength to mine. We may hold him. We may draw him back.”

“Or?”

“Or we may fall with him into emptiness.”

Fall with him into emptiness! Would the gateway in the west open for a soul lost, falling endlessly, at the northern edge of the world? Deor doubted it. It would be the second death for him, damnation, trapped in the earth where Those-Who-Watch could not see him or bless him.

But it was Morlock. It was Morlock. Better to be damned than to go back without him, to explain to Aloê, to Vetrtheorn, to everyone,
Yes, he is gone. Perhaps I could have saved him but I was afraid. . . .
That would be damnation.

He grasped one of Ambrosia's outstretched hands, and Kelat took the other. The males kneeled beside the woman in the melting snow.

Then the prison of Deor's skull broke open and his soul was drifting free in the endless air over the edge of the world. He didn't like it. His body was gone and he seemed to himself a shell of silver scales with nothing inside. He didn't like that either.

He wasn't alone, though. He saw a green-and-gold whirlwind that he knew immediately was Ambrosia. Beyond her was a kind of coppery lightning bolt that he recognized as Kelat.

They moved together through the abyss, guided by Ambrosia's will. The dome of the sky was close enough that Deor could see/feel its curve.

Ambrosia focused on an entity adrift in the gulf between the end of the world and the end of the sky: a flickering of black-and-white mingled with white-and-black. Morlock.

Deor stood in the air where he was, at Ambrosia's unspoken command. Kelat passed onward with her, until he, too, was told to stop. Then Ambrosia went on alone into the gulf until she was almost as distant as Morlock, and the bond with her grew as tenuous as an old man's memory.

From far away, Deor heard Ambrosia speaking without words to Morlock. He tried to add his unvoice to hers, was unsure if it had any effect.

There was a time, and then another time, and Deor blinked and found he was awake.

He sat up gasping. The bond was broken. Had they failed?

The first thing he noticed was that he was lying in the snow alone. He looked about and saw that Ambrosia and Kelat were setting up an occlusion and talking in that intimate way they had when they thought that nobody could hear them. Deor's hearing was quite acute; his intolerance for the mating habits of the Other Ilk was equally sharp. Fortunately he had great skills at not noticing what he didn't want to notice.

Morlock was on his feet, dragging Skellar's body up on to the bridgehead of the broken Bridge of Souls.

“Here, you!” he called, leaping to his feet. “Wait for me!”

Morlock waited, and Deor, as he caught up with him, gathered up Skellar's dangling feet. “What are we doing?” he asked.

“Skellar is dead at last,” Morlock said. “I thought I would toss it over the edge of the world.”

“Better than burying it in snow for ice-dragons to gnaw on,” Deor agreed.

They carried the dead mandrake to the edge of the broken bridge and tossed it off. They watched in silence until the body was lost in the misty blue gulf below.

“So,” Deor said. “You made it back,
harven
.”

“Yes.”

“Did it work?”

“Eh.”

“Not good enough,
harven
. Try again.”

“The Soul Bridge is broken. The wound in the sky seems to have closed. But we don't know if the sun has been permanently harmed, or if the Sunkillers will try again.”

“If you had to guess?”

Morlock shrugged. “They may have other problems for a while.”

“Then we go home.”

Morlock looked a while longer into the misty gulf. Then he turned his back and walked away from the end of the world: homeward, as Deor supposed.

A year and fifteen days later, on the tenth day of Harvesting, the fourth day of fall, four ragged travelers walked up the long slope into the northern edge of the Dolich Kund.

The watch-dwarves on duty were playing dice on a flat stone in front of Northgate. One raised his eyes to look at the travelers with friendly curiosity as they approached and then said in Ontilian, “Hey! I know you!”

The woman in the group said, “I know you, too, watcher, though I'm afraid I don't remember your name.”

“Kudh Spearholder, Lady Ambrosia,” said the watch-dwarf with the sun-bright hat, doffing said hat and bowing low. He snapped a few crunchy Dwarvish syllables at his fellow watchers and they leapt to their feet.

“Lady Ambrosia. Sir Ambrosius.”

“Don't call me that.”

“Lord Ambrosius.”

“Morlock.”

“A beautiful name. A golden name.”

“Eh.”

“Noble travelers, the weather is warmer than it was when I shared your fire a summer or two ago, when it seemed the world was dying. But won't you come in and accept the best of what we have to offer? The Lorvadh has standing orders that any of you, any one of you, who cares to pass through our territory be treated with the highest honor. He would himself be honored to see you again.”

“We're not sure we'd be honored to meet him,” Ambrosia said. “Sorry if that wounds you, Kudh Spearholder.”

“Oh, you're thinking of old Vyrn, last year's Lorvadh? He's no longer a master. He found it cut into his moneymaking. Spends his hours wallowing naked in gold coins, I've heard. No, Fyndh is the new Lorvadh, and there's some talk of keeping him in the job next year, too.”

“I'd be glad to meet with Fyndh again,” said Ambrosia. “And Morlock has some business to discuss with the master makers under the Blackthorns.”

“Then we part company here, my friends,” said Deor. He had promised himself he would never set foot in the deep halls of the Endless Empire again. “No, don't get weepy on me. Kelat and Ambrosia, I'll see you soon, I hope. Morlock, I'll meet you back in Tower Ambrose. I mean to stop by Thrymhaiam on the way and give them the news there, so you may reach the city first.”

Morlock grabbed his forearm, saying nothing of course. Kelat stuttered out something behind his mask. Ambrosia nodded warmly and said, “Travel safe, Deortheorn. We'll expect you at the wedding.”

“That will depend,” Deor said and turned away to march up the slope. His enthusiasm for the mating rituals of the Other Ilk was limited.

He turned back to have a final glimpse of them, but they had gone inside the deep halls by then, and the watch-dwarves had gone back to playing dice. He did get a little weepy then, although he didn't know why. Only later did he understand. Perhaps he had felt the future without understanding it. He never saw any of them again.

Morlock stayed on, enjoying the hospitality of the Endless Empire only long enough to make a new nose for Uthar Kelat.

The young prince was resistant to the idea at first, but Ambrosia insisted. “My friend,” she said, “if you had lost your nose bravely in battle, it would be one thing. But your kinsmen will be cunning enough to sniff out a nose lost to frostbite—a fool's injury, or so those who have never seen the deep north might think it. No, you'll wear your nice nose and like it, my friend, or we will never be married.”

Kelat's noseless face was torn with mixed emotions. “If I marry you, do I have to be the next King of the Vraids?”

“Not exactly. You get to be, which is somewhat different.”

Uthar Kelat was unconvinced, but he consented to wear a nose.

Morlock had made a wooden leg or two in his time, but replacing a facial feature required developing new skills. He got quite good at creating lifelike noses out of wax, but the problem was that none of them looked really convincing against the mobility of Kelat's face. But the master makers of the deep halls under the Blackthorns put their heads together with Morlock, and together they developed a nose of wax and fungus, with pseudo-muscles woven of spider silk. Morlock sealed the pseudo-muscles to the real muscles of Kelat's face, and wove the scarred edge of Kelat's skin together with the false nose. The result was a masterpiece of making, its greatness revealed by the fact that no one would ever be able to tell it was made at all, unless they already knew.

“That's your wedding gift,” Ambrosia said when they parted company. “Don't bring anything else.”

“Bring it where?” asked Morlock, confused.

“To the wedding, brother. I didn't get to go to yours, but you will be at mine. Give me about a year to set it up—that should be enough time.”

Morlock's wedding had been a dinner at which he and Aloê had told their friends they were married, but he knew they did things differently in the unguarded lands, especially royal families. He nodded, hugged his sister, and turned away.

Kelat was waiting to shake his arm in the Vraidish fashion. “Thanks,” Kelat said.

“Watch out on hot days,” Morlock said. “I don't think the wax will melt, but. . . .”

“Oh,” Kelat raised his hand to his face. “I'd forgotten about that. Thanks for that, too, then.”

“What else?”

Kelat threw up his hands in exasperation. “You figure it out! When you do, remember I said it. Good fortune, Morlock.”

“And to you and yours,” said the crooked man, and turned away toward the crooked, high horizon.

He crossed the Dolich Kund and then struck westward through the foothills of the Whitethorns. It was a meandering path, but it suited him. There was fruit and game, and the early autumn weather was warm and golden. He even came upon a hill town that had people dwelling there, although he made a long detour around it.

He came to the Gap of Lone from its northern edge, and one afternoon, as he was about to turn from the rough hills into the flat plain of the Maze, his eye caught a searing glint of something polished or crystalline atop a nearby hill.

It was odd. No one dwelt here. No one built here. But the thing that he saw didn't look natural. He was tempted to go look more closely at it. The longing to go home tugged him in the other direction. But home had waited a long time already, and he was still a vocate to the Graith of Guardians: they would want to know if someone was settling in these slopes, so near to the Wardlands.

He climbed the hill.

The thing at the top was an oblong box made of crystalline stones. Inside the box was a body. He recognized it long before he reached the top of the hill. It was, or had been, Naevros syr Tol.

Naevros lay, as if sleeping, encased in the stone. The sunlight made the crystal glow, reminding Morlock of the armor his avatar had worn when they fought beyond the wide world's end. The body was dressed with Naevros' customary elegance, but his cloak was not the red cloak of a vocate. It was the black cloak of an exile, separated from the Wardlands by the First Decree.