Текст книги "The Wide World's End"

Автор книги: James Enge

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Chains of the God

Danadhar and Morlock strode down the jail corridor side by side. Deor and Kelat fell in behind them. The other freed prisoners, the Gray Folk, stood by and held out their hands toward Danadhar as he passed.

“Ar ryn jyrthin?” Deor asked Kelat in Dwarvish: Do you understand me?

“Yes,” Kelat admitted, in Ontilian. “The Regent wanted some of us to learn Dwarvish so that we could deal with workers from the Endless Empire. But I don’t speak it very well.”

“No one does—certainly not in my family. You have unsuspected depths, Prince Uthar.”

“So does your mother.”

Dwarvish mating practices made this insult pointless indeed, but Deor laughed politely and punched Kelat on the forearm.

They found their packs and weapons in the vestibule of the jail under a shelkhide tarp. The other prisoners waited, politely or reverently, until their saint had passed before filing out into the coldly luminous spring night.

One of them ran back inside—a youngling with a long jaw and bluish scales. “St. Danadhar!” he cried. “The Enemy! The Enemy is coming for us!”

From outside in the dark they heard the cries of terror and exultation, “Olvinar! Olvinar! The Enemy!”

“Morlock,” Deor said urgently.

“Yes,” said the crooked man. He drew his dark, accursed blade and ran out into the night, Deor and Kelat at his heels.

“Ruthenen!” Danadhar called after them, but Morlock ran on, slithering through the crowd of Gray Folk when he could, shoving them out of the way when he had to.

Soon they saw what the Gray Folk had seen and paused to take it in.

The gigantic, cable-laid house at the north end of town was moving. The tower at the top that looked like a head—that was a head—wove back and forth and uttered a shriek like a straight-line wind running down a mountainside of pines.

There was red light coming from the center of the coil.

“Rukhjyrn! Rukhjyrn!” screamed someone in the crowd. The dragon-sickness! The dragon-sickness!

The gigantic snake began to move, uncoiling itself, reaching for the distant stars, shaking mundane fire from it as it moved.

“Wait!” Deor shouted, but Morlock had shouldered off his pack and was already running. There were human figures moving, dark outlines in the cascade of fire.

Morlock dashed into the burning torrent, dodging left and right to avoid planks and beams, heedless of the heat and fire.

Danadhar came to a halt beside Deor. “What happened to the Olvinar’s house?” he asked, gasping.

“Ambrosia Viviana, I think,” said Deor. “Look!”

One of the two human figures was trapped under something. The other was standing near, a strangely shining ovoid in one hand, a long blade in the other. And a beard—the dark outline definitely sported a beard. “The old bastard!” he muttered in Wardic.

“It is the Olvinar,” Danadhar said.

“It is Merlin Ambrosius,” Deor said, not disagreeing.

The trapped figure must be Ambrosia; no one else could have lived in that chaos of fire. Before Merlin could strike at her, Morlock was there. He hit the old man with the fist holding his sword. The bearded figure went flying, lost his grip on his blade, juggled the shining egg wildly, almost fell but did not quite.

Ambrosia’s voice stabbed through the flames. “Kill him, Morlock! Kill him!”

Morlock raised his damned sword.

“Morlock!” shouted Deor. “No! Xoth dhun! The bond of blood!”

Morlock’s twisted shadow paused—and sheathed the sword. He turned to where his sister lay trapped.

Danadhar ran from Deor’s side into the flames. His garments were afire at the first step, but he ignored them, going to where Morlock stood.

Merlin’s dark shape steadied, took hold of the shining egg with both hands. He seemed to look at his offspring for a moment, then turned away and was lost in the flames.

Together, Morlock and Danadhar hefted the burning beam off Ambrosia and she rolled to her feet. “Where is that demented old cutthroat?” Deor heard her demand.

He did not hear whatever Morlock and Danadhar said to her, if anything. The three came together through the burning wrack and out of it.

It was Danadhar, rather than Ambrosia, who collapsed when they emerged from the flames—except for those still flickering among the rags that had been his clothing.

“Haven’t firewalked for an age,” he said apologetically, struggling to his feet. “An intoxicating experience. Most mrmrmrblble.”

Morlock took off his smoldering cloak and handed it to the Gray One.

“Yes. Yes. Thanks, ruthen.” Danadhar took the cloak and wrapped it around his midsection as a makeshift kilt. “Wouldn’t do for the Gray Folk to see their saint naked. Though they’d find a way to explain it as a miracle.” He waved a clawed hand vaguely at the fire and the gigantic snake slithering off into the night. “Find a way to put this on me. ‘Nother miracle o’ St. Danadhar. Pardon me.” He put his hands up to his snout and literally held his mouth shut for a few moments.

“I’m sorry, ruthenen, and new friend Kelat,” he said when he released himself. “Do you not get fire-drunk?” he asked Ambrosia and Morlock.

“I feel a kind of high,” Ambrosia admitted.

“Eh. I prefer a drink-drunk,” Morlock said.

“We must empty a few jars sometime,” Danadhar said. “Ruthen,” he continued, speaking to Ambrosia, “I am Danadhar, god-speaker for this unhappy town. I am glad to meet you. I have heard much of your exploits among the Vraids.”

Ambrosia took his proffered hand without apparent fear, which is more than Deor could have done: apparently the Gray Folk around here didn’t bother trimming their nails. “I am pleased to meet you, too, God-speaker. I have heard almost nothing of you or your folk.”

“That’s how we prefer it, mighty Regent of the Vraids. We have few friends among the Other Ilk or the Little—the dwarves, I mean.”

“You have one more as of tonight.”

Danadhar spread his claws wide and placed his scaly palms on his ventral shield—evidently a gesture of respect.

“Listen, God-speaker, my brother may or may not have mentioned it, but we have good reason for trying to speak to your God. Is there any way you can get us across the battle lines? Both sides seem to respect you.”

“You can speak to my God here or anywhere, Lady Ambrosia. But I take it you mean the evil avatar that lives in the temple.”

“I do.”

Danadhar bowed his head. “Yes,” he said. “I can and I will. I must ask you not to trust him.”

Kelat snorted. Danadhar turned to look at him in surprise.

“In Vraidish,” Deor explained, “that means, ‘I think you can count on us following your excellent advice.’”

Whether godstruck or godhater, the Gray Folk did indeed honor Danadhar. As he led the four travelers away from the fire, many of the Gray Folk who had gathered to watch went down on their knees and shouted his name. The others, godhaters perhaps, put their hands on their bellies and bowed.

One Gray stepped in front of them. He had the braided belt of an excantor, and he carried a blood-stained pike in his hand.

“Saint Danadhar,” he said tentatively.

“I am Danadhar. I don’t know what a saint is.”

“Those Other Ilk with you—it was the Olvinar’s order that they should be kept in confinement.”

“The Enemy is gone. You see behind us the ruin of his house.”

The excantor closed his eyes, opened them. “Then the rebellion is over.”

“No,” said Danadhar firmly. “If you look at that thing poisoning the temple and rebel against it, the rebellion goes on. May it never be over. Believe or disbelieve in the God, but rebel against evil when you see it—and the more powerful it is, the more you must rebel. I charge you with it, excantor.”

The excantor stood straighter. “Then I must not let you pass. I must carry out the Olvinar’s commands, though he is no longer here to give them.”

“You must do as you think right. You may kill me, if you like, as I see you have killed others of our blood. But, unless you do, I will pass by you and bring these four to the temple.”

From the way Morlock was standing, Deor knew that he was about to draw his sword. If he did, the conscientious excantor would go to seek the truth or untruth of all religions in the afterlife, of this Deor had no doubt. But would that bring the godhaters in the crowd down on them.

But the excantor lowered his pike and turned away.

Danadhar led them into the burning heart of the city where the Gray Folk fought for and against their God and each other. Each time weapons were directed at him or the four travelers, he talked calmly and rationally and urgently, and they passed on unharmed.

What he could not prevent, or did not try to prevent, was this: they were followed. The godstruck and the godhaters, silent warriors and singing excantors, every Gray One who saw them seemed to join the parade.

They came at last to the temple, stark in the moonslight.

“I will not go in with you,” Danadhar said quietly. “The hate I feel for the avatar is dangerous for my soul.”

Morlock grabbed him by the arm, released him. They nodded at each other. Morlock vaulted up the steps of the temple and the other three travelers followed more slowly.

“I’ve never met a god before,” Deor whispered to Kelat. “What’s it like?”

“I don’t remember it very well,” said the Vraid.

The interior of the temple was a study in gold and red. Gold coins and objects covered the floor of the many-pillared temple, and the whole was lit only by the fiery eyes of the dragon who lay across this immense hoard.

It was a dragon . . . and it was a device. Cables ran into the dragon’s fiery eyes and into his ears. They attached him to a crystalline machine anchored to the gold-heaped floor. The machine, the dragon’s eyes, and the gigantic jewel imprisoned in his metallic right foreleg, all radiated a fiery flickering light.

Angular elements moved within the crystalline device; images seemed to come and go. Deor itched to take the thing apart and see how it worked, but he put his hands under his arms and tried to quell the feeling. He avoided looking the dragon in the eye. He’d had one case of dragonspell a long time ago and hadn’t enjoyed it much.

Of course, I knew you were coming, said the dragon.

Morlock grunted. “Eh. Here we are, anyway.”

Then the Graith will consider my proposal?

“No.”

Perhaps you yourselves will make the trade that I proposed—will guide me to a fresh world in return for what I have learned?

“No.”

Will you aid me against the godhaters who would enter this temple and slay me?

“No.”

Then why have you come?

“To learn what you know of the dying sun.”

You ask everything; you offer nothing. We will reach no agreement on these terms, Ambrosius.

“We’ll save the world, if we can. If you are in the world, that’s not nothing.”

If the world could have been saved, I would have saved it. I am not called the God here for no reason.

“But you are not, in fact, God,” Morlock pointed out. “We may be able to do what you can’t.”

Doubtful.

“We destroyed the Two Powers.”

They are worshipped still in Vakhnhal and through the Anhikh Kômos. Their missionaries walk west and south and north. For all I know, their apostles sail to Qajqapca.

“You see through countless eyes. Have you seen the Two Powers since they nailed you here?”

The dragon’s tail moved restlessly across his hoard. No, he admitted at last.

“Then?”

No! Nothing for nothing! That’s my law, Ambrosius.

“If the world dies, you will die and all your knowledge will be lost.”

You can’t save the world. Old Ambrosius could not. I cannot. No one can.

“Convince us.”

Nothing for nothing.

Outside the temple, Danadhar was speaking to the crowd. They could hear no words, but they did hear the thunder of the crowd’s response; it shook the pillars of the temple.

“I think your time here is done, Rulgân Silverfoot,” Morlock said. “Where will you spend the last days of the dying world?”

The dragon snarled.

Morlock waited.

Deor almost spoke, but Ambrosia caught his eye and shook her head.

Nothing for nothing! the dragon said. If I tell you what you want to know, will you help me escape from here?

Morlock considered briefly. “Yes,” he said.

The dragon submerged his snout in gold and grumbled a bit. Then he raised up his face and said, Agreed. I will self-bind to tell you what I know. You will self-bind to assist me to escape, if there is any trouble. There is going to be trouble, from what I see out in the town square.

“No binding magics,” Morlock said. “You’ll have to trust me.”

The dragon glared and lashed his tail, sending gold coins skittering around the temple chamber. Morlock looked Rulgân in the eye and waited.

Agreed! the dragon rumbled at last.

“Then.”

The dragon spoke.

Ambrosius, when last you saw me I was very new in my godhood. I could use the temple of the mandrakes to see through their eyes and ears, but I could not control their wills. Nor can I always do so now. I must lure a mandrake into surrendering its will to mine, a long, tedious business sometimes. The first was Skellar, who you may remember as god-speaker here on your last visit. He walked abroad, servile to my will, unable to live as a mandrake or be reborn as a dragon.

It amused me to send him to places he hated to go. For instance, he feared water, so I made him swim across the Sea of Stones. He feared the Little Cousins, so I sent him as my emissary to the Endless Empire under the Blackthorns. And he feared the cold, so I sent him north to the end of the world.

His eyes were my eyes, and his ears were my ears, but his pain was not my pain. I left him will enough to seek his own survival when threatened, but not enough to resist my commands. He spent some time in the city of werewolves, Wuruyaaria; you would be amused to hear his adventures there, perhaps. But the geas I placed on him drove him ever further north, through the grim, bright rind of the world where beasts become strange, until he stood at the furthest point north where a beast with two feet may walk; beyond was only sky, blue emptiness like Merlin’s eyes.

There is a bridgehead there, where the world ends, and the bridge runs through the sky into another world. Standing on the bridge was a thing that had neither hands nor feet nor body nor anything that could be seen. But it was there: Skellar felt the imprint of its angular intelligence on his own.

He stood there for a long time, void of purpose. I had told him to go north but had not said what he should do when there.

The presence on the bridge spun a mouth made of ice in the middle air. It used the mouth to say, “Why are you here?”

“I was sent,” Skellar answered.

“Who sent you?”

“God.”

“Which god?”

“The God.”

“Was it one of the Two Powers?”

Skellar hesitated. “No.”

“The-one-you-would-call-I,” said the thing on the bridgehead, “senses an association. Is the God who sent you the Balancer?”

Skellar thought. It was difficult for him because I had not allowed him to do much of this since I took him over. “I don’t know,” he said after a time—a great deal of time, it seemed to me, when I assimilated his memories.

“Is your God akin to the Two Powers?”

Now Skellar thought of the day when I came to his town, and the miracles the Two Powers worked on my behalf, and how he helped them install me in the temple. So he said, “Yes.”

“You are to report to whom-you-would-call-me,” the presence said.

“I don’t understand,” Skellar said.

The presence seized his mind, broke it open like the seal on a message, and read it.

That was when I noticed what was happening. You cannot always be looking out of every pair of eyes available to you—not when you have as many of them as I do. But the presence now touched the bond that pertained between me and my mandrake.

“Who are you?” the presence said to me, through Skellar.

I took the time I needed to assimilate Skellar’s memories. The presence waited: they have no impatience, these things—no real sense of time.

“I am the one true God of the mandrakes,” I said. “Who are you?”

“You would not understand the-one-you-call-me.”

“Why not?”

“Because you would call the-one-you-would-call-me me.”

“That appears to me to be nonsense, and I require the services of my mandrake.”

It tried to seize control of my will through the bond, but I was ware of it and resisted. We fought much of a day and night in the arena of Skellar’s mind: I watched the shadows change, grow, diminish, change.

In the end it seized Skellar’s mind and dragged it from his body, over the edge of the world and across the bridge that spans the abyss.

I let the bond persist. Why not? Skellar would not be much use anymore, even if he lived, so the knowledge I gained from his suffering would be the last yield I could expect from him.

I can’t tell you how much time passed, since beyond the barrier of the world I found neither sun nor moons nor stars nor anything that I could understand as marking time or change.

There are no people there. I soon understood this. Each of these presences was the same as the other—like different coins, from different places, different writing on them, but all the same, too: stack them one on another and you cannot tell one from the other.

The presence who had taken Skellar and me dragged us to a place where several other presences were. They merged or conferred or something. Now it was the same presence, but more forceful, with more knowledge. They gathered other pieces, apparently at random, and the presence grew.

They did not speak to me anymore. They made patterns of knowledge and they expected me to fit mine into theirs. Perhaps I did! Not much of what I knew would be of interest to them. But I knew that the Wastelands had been freed of the soul-killing power that dwelt there, and that the Two Powers were no longer to be found abroad in the world. Perhaps they know that now, too.

Most of what they knew, I could not understand. But I saw that they were hostile to light, and life, and they had a plot to kill the sun and pass into our world after its death.

I was losing myself in their patterns . . . becoming the kind of nothing that each of them was. I saw with my other eyes that much time had passed, and I broke the bond with Skellar. His mind may still live and suffer there, but I cannot reach it.

That was a generation of men or mandrakes ago. Now we see the sun dying, and the world with it. Is it any wonder that I seek escape?

Morlock stood listening intently, his head bowed, staring past the dragon as if he were looking all the way to the end of the world.

“Then,” he said at last.

The dragon roared in fury that shook the pillars of his temple. Will you speak in whole sentences, you vague, grunting gutworm!

“Not about this,” Morlock said. “Not to you.”

The dragon grumbled into his gold and then said, I care not. Fulfill your word or break it, Ambrosius.

“Wait,” said Kelat, causing Deor and Ambrosia to glance at him in surprise.

The dragon looked at him, a deadly amusement in his fiery eyes. Yes, son of man?

“You stole my mind, when I was last here. I demand . . . I demand compensation.”

What I steal is mine. Your mind was mine, not yours, because I could take it. I do not buy or sell.

“Then I will kill you.”

Men have killed dragons on occasion, but I have never been one of them.

“I’m with him,” Deor said impulsively. “You owe the—you owe Kelat some answers. Your agreement with Morlock doesn’t bind me.”

The dragon looked at Morlock. Morlock said nothing. He glanced at Ambrosia. She shrugged impatiently and pointed out the door of the temple, where Danadhar’s voice could be heard, a lone ship sailing against a storm of shouting.

What do you want? the dragon said reluctantly. The gold I am leaving for my spellbound servants to bring away. Do you want some of it? Take it.

Kelat seemed repelled. Deor could understand it. Blood has no price. . . . This grief, this shame was like that.

“Answer a question,” Deor suggested.

“Yes!” said Kelat eagerly. “You put a gem in my head to control me. How? Who made it?”

Old Ambrosius, of course, the dragon said. He, too, broke the Wards, through some knowledge of his own he would not share. I dealt with him through agents and the spellbound—never trusting him, you see. And I was right: all along he was plotting to attack me.

“Old Ambrosius,” whispered Kelat.

“Also, Merlin,” Deor observed. “Also, Olvinar. And many another name.”

“Lightbringer lately, I understand,” Ambrosia said wryly. Morlock looked at her incredulously and she said, “Yes, I thought that would amuse you, brother.”

This is very warm and cozy, the dragon remarked sourly, and I’m sure it’s very amusing. But those mandrakes outside are preparing to enter and resolve their religious disputes at my expense. They’ll kill you, too, I think: the god-speaker is having trouble talking them out of it. Time to keep your word or break it, young Ambrosius.

Morlock drew his black, shining blade and descended into the hoard. He waded through the gold until he reached the crystalline device. He paused to examine it and the shining cables passing out of it.

“This is a very intricate and beautiful device,” he said.

Yes. Yes. It feels almost like a part of me. There is no chance to bring it along when I leave, I suppose?

“None. This is only the visible extrusion; it is built all through this temple.”

The dragon groaned sadly.

Morlock paused again to pick up a piece of gold. “This metal seems even denser and heavier than gold,” he said to the dragon.

The dragon said nothing, but opened his many-fanged mouth in a predatory smile.

“A dead dragon is heavier than lead,” Morlock said. “Do you draw something from the metal that helps you fly?”

You expect an answer? the dragon said.

“You’ve given the answer, worm,” Deor muttered under his breath. Morlock, too, seemed pleased with the dragon’s ambiguous response. He nodded and flipped the coin away.

Morlock approached the dragon’s face. Deor’s fingers and toes curled, as if he were standing on the edge of a precipice or riding a hippogriff through the middle air. But Morlock showed no signs of fear as he came within reach of the dragon’s long, wolf-like jaws. He looked closely at the cables sinking into the dragon’s eyes and earholes.

“Are you ready?” he asked Rulgân, who only growled in answer.

This was enough for Morlock. Using his left hand, he gripped the cable coming out of the dragon’s right eye; using his right hand, he cut through the cable with Tyrfing.

The dragon shrieked.

Morlock did the same with the other three cables, and each time the dragon shrieked fiery despair and poison smoke like mist filled the temple chamber.

The ends of the cables were still lodged in the dragon’s head. Morlock gestured at one of them.

Yes, hissed the dragon.

Morlock sheathed his sword and took hold of the cable with both hands. He pulled.

The dragon roared his agony, writhing on his gold bed, pounding the pillars and the floor with his tail, sending fire and smoke throughout the temple chamber. Pillars were destroyed; sections of the roof fell in. Ambrosia, Deor, and Kelat tried to keep to the least dangerous parts of the chamber, their eyes on Morlock in case he needed assistance. He did not pause until the dragon’s eyes and ear holes were free from obstructions.

The noise from within only increased the noise from without. Now Deor could hear words in the cries. “Kill the God!” “Kill the outsiders before they can kill the God!” “Vengeance and freedom!” The crowd liked that and repeated it a lot: “Vengeance and freedom!”

No sentiment could have pleased Deor’s dwarvish heart more, except that he feared that he and his would be caught up in that wave of vengeance.

Rulgân rose up on his back legs, towering over Morlock. Deor rushed to stand by him, in case Rulgân attacked, and he heard Kelat and Ambrosia wading through gold in his wake.

But Rulgân didn’t attack. He put his narrow, winged back against the cracked roof of the temple and pushed; the roof split apart, showering timber, stone, and mortar. The sky was open to him now: he could escape his erstwhile worshippers.

Coated with dust and grit, he was pale, like the ghost of a dragon. He looked down in fury and contempt at the four travellers at his feet.

But he roared, If I let them kill you, who’ll save the world? He reached down and scooped them up, Ambrosia and Morlock in one clawed foot, Deor and Kelat in the other. He lifted them over his fuming head and leapt straight up into the sky.

Deor was utterly aghast. He watched with horror as the dragon’s wings unfolded like sails and then beat back to drive them deeper into the sky. The fire-scarred town below spun dizzily in the dark, fell away below and behind. The stars were gone. The moons were gone. There was nothing but the stench of the dragon and Kelat’s terrified face, which Deor proceeded to vomit onto. He would have been ashamed indeed, except that Kelat vomited more or less simultaneously.

“This is the worst!” Deor kept telling himself. “Nothing on this terrible journey will ever get worse than this!”

Half of the dark dragon-lit world began to grow gray. That part was the sky, Deor guessed. The still-dark part the ground. But sometimes it was above, sometimes below, as the dragon spun crazily through the air. The horizon ahead of them had rough, saw-tooth edges: mountains.

They were falling. They were falling. They were falling.

The dragon stalled in the air, just above the ground, and released them from his claws. He flew away into the still-dark east without another word.

They lay on the slope without moving for a while. Deor heard someone retching and was dimly glad that he was done with all that. Then his body was trying to vomit even though there was nothing left for his belly to give but stinking bitterness.

As they lay there, a storm walked south from the mountains. The snowflakes began to fall thick about them as the day’s light struggled to be seen in the west. They would have to move soon or freeze to death.

It was the first of Harps, the first full day of summer.