Текст книги "The Wide World's End"
Автор книги: James Enge
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ALSO BY JAMES ENGE
A TOURNAMENT OF SHADOWS
A Guile of Dragons
Wrath-Bearing Tree
The Wolf Age
This Crooked Way
Blood of Ambrose
Published 2015 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
The Wide World’s End. Copyright © 2015 by James Enge. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover illustration ©Steve Stone
Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke
Cold Wind To Valhalla
Words and Music by Ian Anderson
Copyright © 1975 The Ian Anderson Group Of Companies, Ltd.
Copyright Renewed 2004
All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, locales, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Inquiries should be addressed to
Pyr
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Amherst, New York 14228
VOICE: 716–691–0133
FAX: 716–691–0137
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Enge, James, 1960-
The wide world’s end / by James Enge.
pages ; cm. – (A tournament of shadows ; Book Three)
ISBN 978-1-61614-907-9 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-61614-908-6 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3605.N43W53 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014035459
Printed in the United States of America
To Michael Korte
who stood with me once at the end of another world
Acknowledgments
A thousand thanks are due to Ian Anderson, for permission to quote his lyric from “Cold Wind to Valhalla.”
Ten thousand thanks to Lou Anders for his kindness, his patience, and his attentive reading that so improved my work. If you, patient reader, still don’t like it, it’s not his fault.
Contents
Invocation
PART ONE: THE WINTER WAR
Chapter One: Lone Survivor
Chapter Two: Conversations in A Thousand Towers
Chapter Three: Knife
Chapter Four: Red and Gray
Chapter Five: Evening in the Gravehills
Chapter Six: The Hill of Storms
PART TWO: RITES OF SPRING
Chapter One: What Really Happened
Chapter Two: Blood’s Price
Chapter Three: Death of a Summoner
Chapter Four: The Last Station
Chapter Five: Evening in A Thousand Towers
Chapter Six: A Parting; a Meeting
Chapter Seven: A Needle of Sunlight
Chapter Eight: Vengeancer
Chapter Nine: The Lacklands
Chapter Ten: Scenes of the Crime
Chapter Eleven: Among the Vraids
Chapter Twelve: Intruder in the Death House
Chapter Thirteen: The Sea Road to Grarby
Chapter Fourteen: Empty Sock
Chapter Fifteen: The God and His Enemies
Chapter Sixteen: Dead Ends
Chapter Seventeen: Miracles of St. Danadhar
Chapter Eighteen: Second Chances
Chapter Nineteen: Enemies of the Enemy
Chapter Twenty: End of Deceit
Chapter Twenty-One: The Chains of the God
PART THREE: A COLD SUMMER
Chapter One: Endless Empire
Chapter Two: Fire, Gods, and a Stranger
Chapter Three: To Market, To Market
Chapter Four: The Flight of the Viviana
Chapter Five: The Wreck of the Viviana
Chapter Six: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Chapter Seven: The Graith Divided
Chapter Eight: News from Home
Chapter Nine: Ghosts and Shadows
PART FOUR: FALL
Chapter One: The Way Back
Sigil
APPENDICES
A. The Lands of Laent during the Ontilian Interregnum
B. The Gods of Laent
C. Calendar and Astronomy
D. The Wardlands and the Graith of Guardians
E. Note on Ambrosian Legend and Its Sources, Lost and Found
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Three leagues beyond the wide world’s end.
Methinks it is no journey.
–“Tom O’Bedlam’s Song”
INVOCATION
I’ll tell the tale, since you insist, but it won’t be like the songs they sing. I saw much of what I’m about to tell with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears, felt it with my own heart. But I won’t be saying I-I-I all the way through. I was a different person then. And any time you tell a story about yourself, it isn’t about you, really. The teller is never the tale, or anyone in it.
Old Father Tyr, standing outside the world with Those-Who-Watch, shape my words like stones to build a bridge to the truth. Creator, guide my creation, which is yours also. Sustainer, give me the breath to complete it. Avenger, teach me when to end it, as you end all things in their time.
PART ONE
The Winter War
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
–Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
CHAPTER ONE
Lone Survivor
Night begins the day, and in the darkness of night the first day of spring was being born. In the west, great Chariot was rising, bright with hope as it re-entered the world. No other moon was in the sky, but Chariot’s light filled up the snow-covered plain of the Gap of Lone, and the gray-caped thain walking on it.
The thain went his way toward the base of the cliff with slow deliberate steps, as if he had all the time in the world. His gray cape of office was charred with fire and stained dark with dried blood. Fresh blood, black in the moon’s blue light, was running down his legs and squelching in his shoes, staining his footprints in the new snow like mud.
Among the gray stones of the cliff face was a hollow. In the hollow hung a golden bell. The thain picked up the copper striker that lay below it. He didn’t trust his trembling fingers to hold the slender stalk of metal so he gripped it with both hands, as if it were the handle of a sledgehammer. He struck the bell as hard as he could (which wasn’t so very hard): three times. Then he waited there, although he could hear his pursuers loping toward him through the snow, voiceless though they were. He struck the bell three more times and fell dead in the shallow snowdrifts at the base of the cliff.
The bell rang in the little hollow. It rang in the watchroom of the Gray Tower, the Graith’s guardpost over the Gap of Lone. It rang in the thains’ Northtower, on the border of Thrymhaiam in the far north. It rang in Anglecross Tower in the west of the Wardlands, in Islandkeep that guarded the Southhold, in the Graith’s chamber in the city of A Thousand Towers. The same bell, or an image of it, swung in all those places. The same signal sounded in all those places.
Many thains had set out to send that signal, but only the one survived to deliver the news before he died: the Wardlands had been invaded.
When his enemies found him dead, they cut up his body and rendered it down for soup, as was their custom. But they could not work the striker loose from the thain’s hands, so they cut them off and left them there at the base of the cliff.
Long the hands lay there in the bitter snows, waiting for nothing.
CHAPTER TWO
Conversations in
A Thousand Towers
Two months earlier, in the dim noon of a late-winter day, two men fought a duel in the city of A Thousand Towers.
The city street, where it could be seen through the drifts of snow, was green-gray as fungus—because, apart from the paving stones and the drifts of snow between the buildings, it was, in fact, fungus. A few decades ago, a maker in New Moorhope had developed a kind of mold that could be cultured into building materials. Whole neighborhoods on the edges of A Thousand Towers were built from the stuff. Some time later, they were as rapidly abandoned. It turned out that the fungus absorbed and accumulated bad dreams, so that buildings made with it became unpleasant, even unsafe to dwell in. Destroying the fungus released the bad dreams all at once with perilous consequences. It was decided to let the neighborhoods age and decay over time, releasing their evil dreams gradually in the world. Few ever went there—only those whose business required privacy, and who didn’t fear the infection of a temporary madness or two.
And that day, these two men came there, laid aside their red cloaks in spite of the cold, and prepared to fight.
“Let me see it again,” said the taller man. He was Naevros syr Tol, famed as the greatest swordsman in the Wardlands or the wide world beyond.
The other man, Morlock Ambrosius, was famous for other things. He drew his sword and handed it to Naevros.
The blade was black as death, veined with bone-white crystal down its glittering length to its point. The grip was black and bound with something that felt smooth but comfortingly resistant to his hand. The sword had heft, but was lighter than a metal sword this long would be. There was a disturbing presence to the thing, not merely physical. There was a power in it, and Naevros didn’t like it.
He handed it back to Morlock, the man who made it and who owned it. Morlock was also the man who had married the only woman Naevros felt he could love. There were other women, many other women, in Naevros’ life, but Aloê Oaij was different, and this ugly crooked fellow with the sideways grin got to sleep with her every night.
By rights, Naevros should have loathed the man like the slime from a pus-rat. Yet, somehow, he rather liked him. Morlock could drink a table of dwarves under the table, for one thing. He didn’t say much, but anything he did say was to the point. And he was the only person in the Wardlands who could fence at or near Naevros’ level.
He handed the blade back to Morlock. “So that’s what you won from the Dead Cor on the Hill of Storms!” he said.
“Eh,” Morlock said and shrugged. Days went by sometimes without him saying much more than that but this time, thank God Sustainer, he found the strength to go on. “Not exactly. The blade Gryregaest lay shattered on the Broken Altar when I went to claim it. Later I came to understand that the Dead Cor and his weapon were one, woven together. It died when he did, at last. I took the fragments and made them, unmade them, remade them into this blade. I call it Tyrfing.”
“‘Tyr’s grasp’?” translated Naevros. “After Oldfather Tyr, of course.” Morlock had been born in A Thousand Towers, but was raised by his foster father Tyr syr Theorn in the distant north. Tyr was long dead now, but far from forgotten.
Morlock bowed his head and made to sheath the sword.
“Not on your dwarfy life,” Naevros said flatly. “Our bet stands. I’ll break your sword or take it in a fair fight.”
“We were drunk last night, my friend,” Morlock said. “There is no need for this. We could fence with wooden swords. I brought a pair with me.”
“But did you bring a pair of anything else?” Naevros taunted him, waggling his hips lewdly. “Afraid I’ll put your eye out? Think Old Ambrosius will be mad at you if you go back home with a broken sword?”
He was joking and he was not joking. He was fond of Morlock and he hated him. He wanted to make him laugh (as he could sometimes do) and he wanted to cut his throat (as he might someday do). He mentioned Morlock’s father, old Merlin, because he knew it would sting Morlock to murderous rage. He was restless and he wanted a fight and Morlock was the only person who came close to his skill. His useless sterile skill.
That taunt did it. Morlock was furious, though he hid it well. He stepped back on the mold-gray street and came to guard. His cold, angry eyes fixed on Naevros and he waited in the pale sunlight.
Naevros drew his own sword—no wizardish wonder-blade, but a good piece of metal made for him by the weapon-masters of Thrymhaiam—and saluted Morlock with it. He lunged and thrusted; Morlock parried and riposted, and they proceeded to fight up and down the gray street, empty but for snowdrifts and nightmares.
At first glance they were ill-matched. Naevros was taller, possessing a catlike grace and a fluent, sharp eloquence with the sword. Morlock was shorter, less lithe, with something askew in his shoulders. Still, he was swift and strong. If anger never quite left his ice-gray eyes, he never let his attacks or his defense become reckless.
Apart from the recklessness of what they were doing. To fence with real swords was madness; it took even more control to refrain from injuring your opponent or being injured by him. That was why Naevros liked it. At any moment he could kill or be killed. It was like dancing along the edge of a cliff.
But the two fought for hours, as the dim sun slid from its cloudy zenith to just above the ragged gray-green peaks of the abandoned houses, and the blades never struck home on either combatant.
As a greenish dusk began to rise, they found their swords in a bind. Naevros tried to force the crooked man back. But the crooked man set his feet and pushed in turn. The taller man slipped out of the bind and leapt aside as his opponent tumbled past, blundering into a wall. The taller man eagerly leapt forward to strike at his fallen foe, but then backed away, gasping as his opponent rose in a cloud of dead spores and dark dreams to face him, his shining dark sword at guard.
Naevros then felt something like fear. He saw the crooked man wearing the blue skull-face of Death, with Death’s blue blade in his hand, as the Kaeniar paint him in their Inner Temples. Most frightening of all was something Naevros felt in himself—an easiness, a welcoming of peace and rest. It would all be so much easier if—
“Enough!” he gasped, lifting his free hand in a call for rest. “Morlock, step out of that stuff! We don’t want you tracking nightmares back to Tower Ambrose.”
Morlock Ambrosius never said a word if none would do, so he simply nodded and stepped forward. Naevros stood back and leaned on his sword, breathing heavily, trying to settle his mind, hoping his fear hadn’t shown in his face.
When his breathing slowed to near normal, he said, “We’ll call it a draw, I think. If I ever want to kill you, I guess I’ll have to sneak up behind you with a rock or something.”
“Eh,” Morlock replied. “Do you want to kill me?”
“‘If,’ I said. I said, ‘If.’”
“That’s why I asked.”
“All right, then. Since you ask. I thought about it for a long time. Are you surprised?”
“No. I once thought about killing you, too.”
Naevros turned and looked straight at his opponent, colleague, and friend. “Did you really, you sneaky son-of-a-thrept? May I ask why?”
“I envied your closeness to Aloê,” the crooked man said, naming his wife and Naevros’ one-time thain-attendant.
Naevros found he was blushing. He exhaled completely, inhaled, exhaled, and finally he laughed. “I hadn’t realized you knew about it.”
“Everyone knows.”
“Not everyone knows it’s an intimacy that rivals your marriage.”
For a moment Naevros was afraid Morlock would say It doesn’t in that flat unemphatic way of his that somehow managed to roar in the ears like thunder. And then Naevros would really have to kill him.
Morlock shrugged, and Naevros wondered briefly if that was reason enough to kill him, too. But then Morlock lifted his accursed blade and said, “This was the wrong tool for the job, anyway.”
Tool? Job? Naevros stared at Morlock’s impassive face and wondered if there was some phallic innuendo in play. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“If I cut your throat,” said the ice-eyed man, “I might as well cut my own. That’s no way to reach her heart. She loves you too much—is loyal to those she loves.”
“I see. You couldn’t afford to kill me.” It was interesting to see how much his rival’s thinking had mirrored his own. “So you befriended me instead,” Naevros said speculatively.
Morlock turned away. “No,” he said, with his face averted. “That was always there.”
“How do you mean?”
“You accepted me when few would accept me—trusted me when almost no one trusted me. You saw me as myself, not just my ruthen-father’s son. That . . . matters to me. Will always matter.”
Naevros had mostly done it to irritate Noreê. But, to be fair to himself, he had seen something in that surly young Morlock, something others were disposed to overlook or throw away. Over the past century, he often wished that Noreê had succeeded in her attempt to snap baby Morlock’s neck. But if she had, he would have missed many an evening of drunken conversation, many an afternoon of brilliant fencing. That would have been a loss, no matter what else might have been gained.
Rather than say any of that, Naevros clapped his free hand on the higher of Morlock’s shoulders and said, “Well, I’ll walk you home. Maybe you’ll figure out how to get rid of me on the way.”
Every few days when the Graith was in Station, Aloê and a few of her friends had been meeting to watch the weather and drink tea. The Station was now ended and this was their last meeting.
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.
