The Wide World's End (8 page)

The rest of the time she thought about this strange enemy. Had the Khnauronts, those mindless cannibals, the Strength and the Sight to shatter the Wardlands' immemorial protections? It seemed unlikely.

Were the Khnauronts merely shock troops, sent to pave the way for a more formidable strike force? That was Noreê's secret fear, and to forestall it she drove herself and her attendant-thains night and day to refashion the Wards over and above the Gap of Lone.

But as days passed, and the Maze was remade, and no new enemy came, Noreê was compelled to entertain another hypothesis.

The attack of the Khnauronts was a distraction. Something else, someone else, had entered the Wardlands while the Maze was broken down.

She left her thains-attendant to complete the new Maze by themselves. They were delighted by the trust she showed in them, and even more, she realized, by the prospect of her absence. Unlike Jordel, she was not the type of vocate who drew the affection and loyalty of younger Guardians—and, in fact, she rather despised the type.

She walked at random east and south as her mood took her. As she walked, she let her mind drift away from her body in light rapture. She looked for nothing. She watched everything.

The snows of winter were slowly receding, but the greens of spring had not yet appeared. It was oddly like a warm stretch of days in late autumn. Perhaps in this year would come the last of all autumns. She could feel the weight of the death in the world, the hunger of many who would never eat again. It spoke in the silence of her dreams, whether she waked or slept.

She walked much, ate little, and dreamed all the time. Her course, if plotted on a map, would have looked aimless, but it had an aim in view.

Her thinking was this: Whatever or whoever had entered the Wardlands secretly had come too long ago for conventional methods of trailing. But they had come here for some purpose. The nearer they got to their purpose, the more of a shadow it would cast in the future. That talic shadow would fall, with increasing clarity, on the present. All her unlooking was to look for that. All her indifference was to highlight that difference.

Not many seers could feel the cold drift of talic change rebounding from a future event that might never in fact happen. But she was one, and she was here; the task was hers to do. She never shrank from such tasks, however repugnant they were.

So she walked and dreamed and slept and dreamed and sat and dreamed and waited.

The answer came straight to her one morning as she sat in meditation beneath a leafless maple tree. She looked up to see a man standing awkwardly in front of her. He wore a flat black cap to cover his baldness, and from the way he hid his right hand behind him she suspected he had murdered a close relative, possibly his father. He spoke hesitantly, “I'm sorry to interrupt your thought, Vocate.”

“You haven't.” She felt the chill breeze of the future in this sweaty, fidgety man.

“But you are the Vocate Noreê?”

“I am.”

“There is—I don't want you to think I'm a mere informer. I don't expect to be paid, or anything.”

“Be sure that I will not pay you. I rarely touch money. I have none with me now.”

“Oh.” The man stood still, the fidget struck out of him at the thought of someone with no money.

“You were going to say?” she reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah. There's. In the town there's a stranger, and I don't think he's one of the Guarded. He hardly speaks Wardic.”

The future-chill in her mind transferred itself to this stranger. “What is his name? Can you describe him?”

“He says his name is Kelat, but I think he's hiding something. He doesn't even seem to know where he's from.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He is taller than I am—skin paler than mine, or most people's—hair yellowish. He is staying at Big Rock House.”

“At the southern edge of town,” she predicted. That was what her insight told her, and the man said, “Yes.”

“Thank you,” she said and stood, ignoring his belated offer of a hand up. She walked away.

“And you have no money at all?” the man said plaintively.

“Is that why you killed—for money?” Noreê said to shut him up. And it worked: she never heard him speak again.

Insight, as Noreê knew better than most, arises from the interplay between the mind and the world of talic impressions below the level of consciousness. It was dangerous to be guided by it because it arose from the unconscious without the benefit of reason. So do actions of prejudice, of madness, of folly. To walk in the way of insight was to risk slavery to these kinds of blindness. It was one of the risks she often took for the Guarded, and she knew that they often had to suffer from her mistakes—her prejudice, madness, folly.

But not today. The wind from the future grew colder and clearer with every step she took. She spent a few minutes in un-meditation to bind her awareness more closely to the chaos of matter and energy that most people thought of (wrongly) as reality.

As she walked into Big Rock House she saw a blond man, of average height or a little taller, paying his score.

“Your name is Kelat?” she asked.

He turned to look at her. His brown eyes were vacant, like a dreamer's. His leather jacket was stitched together from the skin of garbucks from the plains north of the Dolich Kund. It was probably older than he was. The laces in his boots were woven from shent, probably harvested from the coast of the Sea of Stones. He was almost certainly a Vraidish barbarian, one of the horde that was gradually conquering the fragments of the old Empire of Ontil.

“I think so,” he said. “Sometimes I think I had another name. Or will have.”

The bald man behind the counter met Noreê's eye and wiggled his ears. Around here that was like saying,
Crazy . . . but what can you do?

What Noreê could and did do was hit Kelat on the left temple; then, while he was stunned, she took hold of his neck and stopped blood flow until he passed out.

When Kelat was sprawled on the beery floor of Big Rock House she said to the old man, “This Kelat is an invader. His intent here is unknown. I need to take him to A Thousand Towers so that the Graith can question him on the Witness Stone.”

“You'll want to talk to the Arbiter of the Peace, then,” the old man said. “She can lend you a cart and horses, maybe a couple of boys to keep Kelat in line.”

“Will you go fetch her?”

“I don't want to leave my cashbox.”

“Which house is hers, then? I'll go myself.”

“Aren't you the one they call Noreê?”

“They do call me that.”

“I guess my money's safe with you. And I guess you're welcome to as much of it as you want. You and your sister cured my grandson of a madness once. That was before you were in the Graith—when you were still among the Skein of Healing at New Moorhope.”

“Ah.” Those had been simpler days. She missed them sometimes. But she did not choose to end up like her sister, who had opened up so many doors in her mind that eventually there wasn't much of a mind left. “I'm sorry; I don't remember your name.”

“I think you never knew it, Vocate. It is Parell.”

“Parell.”

The old man flipped part of the counter back, bowed low before her, and strode off to fetch the Arbiter.

The Arbiter was a young woman, less than two centuries old, with improbably orange hair and black eyebrows. Noreê knew much about people and what they thought, but she did not understand why people dyed their hair. Both the attendants that the Arbiter brought with her had dyed hair as well, so maybe it had something to do with the local chapter of the Arbitrate.

They came riding in a donkey-drawn cart, and as soon as introductions were made all around, the attendants bound Kelat's sleeping form and loaded it into the cart.

“Do you want a force to accompany you?” the Arbiter asked, as Noreê climbed into the driver's seat.

“Only if you want someone to drive the cart back to you,” Noreê said.

“That's not needful. Just return it to one of the Arbiters in A Thousand Towers. Or keep it, if it's any use to you.”

Noreê nodded and was about to depart when she remembered something. “Arbiter, that man who told me of Kelat. . . .”

“Bakell. I know him.”

“I think he's a murderer.”

“I think so, too. He probably killed his father, but we can't prove it. He may have buried the corpse in his house, where we can't get at it. What can you do?”

“You could buy the house. Or someone else might do it on your behalf, to allay suspicion. He seems like someone who would do almost anything for money.”

“Possibly, but then he'd just move the body and any other evidence out of the house before the sale was complete . . .”

Noreê waited for the Arbiter to complete the thought.

“. . . and then we could catch him at it!”

“It seems likely,” Noreê agreed.

“Thanks, Guardian. Ever think of joining the Arbiters?”

“Often. Goodbye.”

She had a bad feeling about the Arbiter—something would go wrong with her, or to her, in the near future. Noreê didn't choose to know about it. She spoke to the donkey and it started up the town's single street. Another word led the donkey to turn up a track leading to the Road.

Money she did not need and could not use. It was others who paid—sometimes with their lives—when she met them. She was sorry for it, sometimes. But she did not do these things for herself; it was for the Guarded. So she told herself, not always quite believing it, as the donkey pulled the cart onto the Road and headed south, toward A Thousand Towers.

Before she reached the city, a passing thain told her the terrible and wonderful news from up north. The Khnauronts were defeated, Thea was dead, and they spoke of Morlock Ambrosius like a king. Like a king.

Thinking of a day in Tower Ambrose more than four generations ago now, the day Morlock Ambrosius had been born, she told herself, “I did what I could.” She knew that was true. And she added, “I will do what I must.” And that was true as well.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Blood's Price

Grief is love. That's the deadly thing about it. You cannot live with grief chewing away at your insides like a cancer. The pain is too great. No one can stand it. But to kill the grief, you would have to kill your love for the one you lost. That is a survival too much like death: to be alive, without love, without caring. Even if you could do it, you would not.

It was fortunate, in a way, that Aloê had been wounded, and that some carnivorous Khnauront had fed from afar on her life. (That was what they told her had happened.) She hardly had the strength to live or grieve. She felt them, grief and the longing to live, felt them struggling within her, shadows fighting in the sandy emptiness of her heart, and it was all she could really feel. But she didn't even feel that much. Her life was ebbing and she was grateful, in a dry, gray way.

Morlock was often there. She sometimes saw Naevros, too, and Deor, and Rynyrth. Once she asked one of them, she could not remember which, where Thea was, and while they hesitated, she remembered and turned her face to the wall.

And once she heard Morlock saying, “My life is hers. Take it all, if there is need.”

And Deor was there, too, with his broad face made for laughing, but he wasn't laughing now as he said, “And mine. Blood has no price!”

“I won't be a part of this!” said a third person angrily. Aloê didn't know her. She was wearing the saffron robes of an initiate to the Skein of Healing, though. They were usually smiling, as if they knew some secret that you didn't, but this woman was not smiling. The secret in her mind had turned unpleasant.

“Get out, then,” Rynyrth said impatiently. “We don't need you here.”

“I cannot permit—”

“Lady, you stand on the western slopes of Thrymhaiam and I am the daughter of Oldfather Tyr syr Theorn. You do not permit me or deny me here. Go!”