Текст книги "The Wide World's End"

Автор книги: James Enge

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Flight of the Viviana

The round-faced man had been weeping: the marks of tears still gleamed on his cheeks, but his voice was carefully even as he said, “I’m talking about the mansion on the bluff north of town—the one with the beautiful view.”

“Yes,” said the hard-faced butcher, “and I’m talking about a full-grown ylka-beast on the hoof—enough to feed a family of four through a cycle of Trumpeter, if they’re thrifty and are fairly fond of soup and organ meat.”

“But I paid three thousand shields for this place last summer! I have a lifetime of savings in gold—”

“This is this summer. It’s today. I wouldn’t let a piece of offal out of my shop for all the gold coins in the twin cities. Straight-up trade: the beast for the property’s deed. Do we have a deal, or shall I call back Master Dinby?”

“Deal,” said the round-faced man glumly. “Can you have someone bring it to my house on Shull Street?”

“Delivery is extra.”

The round-faced man considered this briefly, and then he leaped at the butcher, flailing with his linen-gloved hands and his silk-shod feet. The butcher, surprised, went down in front of his shop. The round-faced man was simultaneously screaming and gnawing at the butcher’s wobbly neck. The resulting sound was a strangely shrill burping or farting effect. But the sight of a butcher being attacked swiftly drew other people into the fray: some defending the butcher, some more intent on getting a kick or a punch in, and still more trying to loot the butcher’s stop, in spite of the armed guards within. People were rushing toward the fight with wheelbarrows of gold; they were rushing away with wheelbarrows of bloody meat; there was screaming and pleading and somewhere, unseen but heard, a chorus of women was chanting a spell meant to rekindle the dying sun.

“I was worried about trying to sneak a werewolf through town,” Ambrosia remarked to Deor as they walked carefully around the fringes of the riot. “Now, not so much.”

“I thought you said Narkunden was the orderly place,” Deor replied.

“It was. You never saw so many laws and regulations. I wonder what can have happened?”

They trudged through a drift of gold-dust. Someone had been carrying it in bags that had come apart. No one passing by was even bothering to pick it up.

“Morlock may have been in town for several days,” Deor observed when they were past the drift and into a quieter street.

“Yes, but he can’t have. . . .” Ambrosia’s voice trailed off.

“Several days,” Deor reminded her.

She shook her head, not quite as if she were disagreeing.

They sneaked through the tangling streets of south Narkunden, climbing steadily higher until the buildings petered out and they passed beyond the city. There was no need for walls there, since the Narkundans feared no incursion from their trading partners to the south, the dwarves of the Endless Empire.

In the ragged field south of town was a fire; beyond it, Deor thought he could detect an occlusion well-hidden by wilderments. To the left of the fire was an odd framework, clearly a work in progress, and many bolts of ulk.

In front of the fire was Morlock, lying supine on the ground, his eyes faintly glowing in rapture. Overhead a cluster of ulken bags, strangely shapeless, floated in midair.

“Morlock,” Ambrosia said drily, “if you can attend to what I say, please join us in the merely material realm. If need be, I will ascend into rapture and drag you back down.”

Morlock raised one hand. The light filtering through the thin skin of his eyelids slowly faded. He sat up.

“I have approximately ten thousand questions,” said Ambrosia with a dangerous tone in her voice. “If you respond to any one of them with, ‘Eh,’ or a grunt, or a shrug, then one of us will go down the dark canyon of death before the ailing sun sets.”

“Eh,” said Morlock predictably.

Ambrosia let him live, possibly because she had not actually asked him any questions yet, and in the end she got her answers.

The floating ulken bags were, not surprisingly, floating ulken bags. Morlock’s cunning plan was to build a big sort of basket, fill it with the ulken bags, cover the basket with more fabric, and float all the way to the end of the world.

“What keeps those things in the air?” Ambrosia said.

“Air’s hot,” Morlock said.

“But it doesn’t stay hot,” Ambrosia said. She pointed at the babble of gasbags, even now sinking toward the ground beside the fire.

“It could,” said Morlock.

“No it can’t.”

“How can it, Morlocktheorn?” Deor asked.

The answer was quite lengthy; the making of things was one of the few subjects that made Morlock communicative—even wordy. Deor wasn’t sure he understood it. Apparently, in deep rapture, one could see the particles of air. Because they were very small, they were easier to herd about. And one could keep the warmer particles of air in one place and shove the colder particles of air away.

“How can you tell them apart?” Kelat wanted to know.

“The warmer they are, the faster they are,” Morlock explained. “The trick is to see them at all, as they are merely matter. But—”

Then he and Ambrosia became embroiled in an extremely technical discussion about seeing, where phrases like “pretalic imprintable foothold” were tossed about pretty freely. Deor stopped listening, although Kelat continued to watch and listen as if it were a fencing match.

Deor walked around the camp. He found a scrap of paper on which the framework of the airship was sketched in Morlock’s spare but detailed style.

He nodded with satisfaction. Deor was no seer, and was not even a master of makers. But he could follow a design that had been made by one. Morlock had collected some lumber, but there wasn’t nearly enough. Then there was the question of the fabric shell for the thing. . . .

He walked up to Kelat and nudged the young man in the ribs. Kelat looked at him bemusedly.

“Can you sew?” Deor asked him.

It took a few tries before he could even get Kelat to understand what he meant, and then the Vraid was indignant. “That’s women’s work!”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then. Well, you’re clever enough to learn. And a word to the wise: don’t use the phrase ‘women’s work’ when Ambrosia is paying attention.”

“Her?” Kelat looked at the Regent, hungrily and reverently. “She’s not like other women.”

“She is and she isn’t. Anyway, you’ve been warned. Come with me, unless you want to walk all the way to the end of the world.”

Kelat managed to learn how to use needle and thread, despite his gonadal arrangements, and soon he and Deor were seated side by side in the field, sewing silken gasbags.

The werewolf, Laurentillus or Liyurrriyu or whatever it was, came over and was looking at their activity with interest.

Deor didn’t understand a single howling syllable that the werewolf ever sang, nor was he sure the werewolf understood him, no matter what language he spoke. But Liyurrriyu was no fool and had hands. Deor taught him what he needed to know by example, and soon they were sewing companionably together.

There was no conversation, though. There could not be, between Liyurrriyu and the others, and Kelat was still intent on eavesdropping on Morlock and Ambrosia. Their argument now sounded more like a strategy session. Deor still didn’t understand it, but he had a task on hand to keep him busy and that was enough for now.

They avoided town as much as possible. It had divided up into warring neighborhoods, each jealously protecting its storeholds and sources of food.

But the warehouse district in the city’s center was more or less abandoned. Deor and Kelat made a journey there one day to get beeswax to help seal the gasbags. They left some gold in payment, even though they knew that gold was essentially worthless in Narkunden now. Deor didn’t like the thought of stealing: the hate of it was hot in his mind.

They had little else to do, so they worked on the airship whenever they were awake. It was a weird looking beast when it was done. The gigantic frame looked like the skeleton of an open-hulled ship. It was filled with gasbags and an enclosed glass furnace to heat them. Around it all they sewed a fabric skin—tight, but not airtight, to contain the gasbags. Anchored onto the lower half of the frame was a sort of not-very-long longboat for the travelers and their gear.

“Won’t we want propellers, or something?” Deor asked Ambrosia.

“What are propellers?” she replied.

He explained, sketching a little in the dirt so that the idea would come across.

“Ingenious!” Ambrosia said. “Yes, I can see how an airship might use them, but this airship won’t need them. Have you looked at the clouds, Deor?

Deor looked up curiously. The sky was half filled with clouds . . . but there was something odd about them, a twisting channel wherever the clouds crossed a line running from north to south. “The sky is cut in two,” he said.

“Yes. Whatever is killing the sun is drawing air with it toward the edge of the world. If we get up that far, we can simply swim in the current.”

“What about the road back?” Deor asked.

Ambrosia did not answer at first, or look directly at him. She smiled, but not at anything Deor could understand. After a while she said, “Maybe we should worry about the return journey when it’s before us. One problem at a time.”

Deor shook his head. He guessed that meant she thought that a return trip was unlikely—unlikely enough not to worry about.

“I think you’re wrong,” Deor said, after some thought. “Suppose the stream fails—at night, say? We might need to maneuver to get to it, also. We could attach the propellers to the gondola or framework—perhaps power them with pedals and impulse wells as on our lost and lamented four-wheeled Hippogriff.”

“Put it to Morlock,” Ambrosia said resignedly.

Morlock heard him out and agreed with a nod—didn’t even say a word. It added a few days to the job, but in the end even Ambrosia agreed it was worth it.

The thing was finally done and they had loaded their gear into the gondola when Morlock said, “What should we call it?”

“It’s an airship, Morlock,” Ambrosia said. “That’s what we’ll call it.”

“It’s supposed to be bad luck to sail on a boat with no name,” Deor pointed out. “We can use all the luck we can get.”

“Any suggestions?” Ambrosia said patiently.

“Sky-Sword of the Vraids!” cried out Kelat. He’d obviously been holding the thought for a while.

“Gasbag,” suggested Deor, less grandiloquently.

“Skyglider,” proposed Morlock thoughtfully. Deor guessed he was thinking of the short-lived Boneglider.

“Wuruklendono!” suggested Liyurriu. At least, it seemed to be a suggestion.

“Viviana,” decided Ambrosia. “Everyone agreed? Think I care? Let’s get aboard and get aloft, then.”

They wedged themselves into the gondola, sitting sideways, each of them at a set of pedals and manuals.

“I’ll take us up,” Morlock said, and closed his eyes. Presently, they saw his irises glowing through the thin skin of his eyelids.

This was the part that Deor knew but didn’t fully understand. Somehow, the two Ambrosii could keep the warmer air in the gasbags and expel the cold air. Eventually, the gasbags would all be full of hot air and lift into the sky and float away, like a politician’s promise.

The body of the airship began to lift from the ground.

Presently, its vast bulk was overhead and they were sitting upright. Ambrosia took her belt and lashed Morlock’s left arm to the rail of the gondola. “Can’t have him falling out,” she observed.

Deor was not afraid of heights. He had spent much of his life in mountains, and had frequently amused himself by climbing crumbling rock faces with his bare hands and feet. He was able to look down and see clouds below him with nothing more in his mind than a mild curiosity about whether it was raining below.

What he didn’t like, what he had never been able to like, what he never would like, was the knowledge that nothing was beneath him. The ground out of which he had been hatched would never betray him; he knew it too well. But he had not been hatched for the air.

Now they were getting high—several man-lengths above the ground and getting higher. Kelat was looking over the edge with considerable interest. Ambrosia was eyeing the glass furnace overhead. Liyurriu, seated just behind him, began a subvocal murmur that carried shrill tones of panic.

Deor was afraid, too. He was afraid that the wooden frame would fall apart and that they would fall. He was afraid that the glass furnace would run out of control, the gasbags would burn, and they would fall. He was afraid that the wind would come and tip them over and they would fly out of the gondola and fall. Then the earth, whom he had betrayed by leaving, would kill him for his betrayal. He was afraid.

But he was bored by his fear. It was always the same. And would it really be so terrible to die? There were worse things, if the teachers of his youth spoke true.

He looked over the rail of the gondola.

They were now quite high and it was becoming quite cold. Kelat’s teeth were chattering, and it was not because he was frightened. He looked as eager as a miner following a vein of ore. It was strangely cold. It must be—

“Ambrosia!” said Deor. “The cold air is cascading down the gasbags.”

“Yes,” said Ambrosia. “That—that should be fixable.” She closed her eyes and ascended into vision. Deor saw blue circles through her closed eyes. But she sat upright and one of her hands rested lightly on the gondola rail; the other was on Kelat’s shoulder.

She was a great seer—far greater than Morlock, who was great enough to have defeated Bleys in at least one notable test of power. Deor wondered at it, but the Sight was not one of his talents, even in the smallest degree.

The light in her eyes faded, and she opened them. The chill draft from above had ceased.

“We’ll try to keep the cold air away from the gondola,” she said. “It depends—”

“Madam, I don’t mean to be rude, but I would hate to see you waste your time. Unless you think that Kelat can benefit by the explanation.”

Ambrosia grinned. “Canyon keep you then, you stiff-necked dwarven non-seer.”

“The same to you, harven.”

They were well over the city of Narkunden now, and the face of the city bore the scars of violence. Two factions were demolishing buildings to make walls around their neighborhoods. Much of the city seemed to be empty. The docks down at the base of the bluff were burning and the bridge between Narkunden and Aflraun was broken.

“Morlock, Morlock,” Ambrosia said sadly. “What were you thinking?”

Deor was stung by this. “He was thinking that many in the city were starving while others grew fat. Or so I believe, madam.”

“Of course he was. But good intentions are no substitute for skill in any art, least of all the art of governance. A man named Ambrosius came to a town. His intentions were not malicious, at least not wholly so. He ignited a civil war and then went his way, and the evil he had begun continued to burn its way through the city. Am I talking about Merlin in Grarby or Morlock in Narkunden?”

“It’s not the same,” Deor said stoutly.

“Why not? Either Morlock knew the harm he would do by destroying the monetary system of the city, or he did not. He was either malicious or ignorant.”

Deor wanted to defend his harven-kin. But he could not quite. Deor knew Morlock understood something of the economics of scarcity: they depended on it when they sold gems and other goods in the marketplace in A Thousand Towers. So why had he let the golden genie out of the bottle?

Deor muttered something and would have let the subject drop, but Ambrosia squeezed Kelat’s shoulder and said, “What do you think, Prince Uthar?”

The Vraidish boy said slowly, “People have what they can hold. Only that.”

“So? Morlock did them no harm by making their gold as worthless as paper?”

“Paper isn’t worthless. It can carry a promise—a love letter—news.”

“You’re getting subtle, my friend. Perhaps you should go in for philosophy rather than kingship. No matter what some people have written, the two things have little to do with each other.”

“I’m not interested in being king and I’m not going to be king, but you haven’t seen what I mean yet.”

“Maybe you haven’t said it.”

“People had a choice of what to do with the knowledge Morlock gave. If they used it as a weapon, it was because they were already at war. Morlock did not help that. But he did not begin it, either.”

“You’ve given me something to think about,” Ambrosia admitted, and none of them spoke for some time.

They were high enough now that the city below was getting hazy. Aflraun, across the steep river valley, was even vaguer, wrapped in its own smoke. The vistas opened up in every direction were terrifying to Deor, but he would not look away from them. He filled his eyes and his mind with cold light and empty distance. The fear didn’t go away, but it began to seem a small thing—smaller, even, than he was.

They continued to rise. And they were drifting northward: Narkunden was now under their keel.

The land was a vague memory below them, and the cities on the Nar well behind them when Deor broke a long silence to say, “It is warmer.”

“And we’re moving faster,” Ambrosia agreed. “We’re entering the sunstream.”

The change was gradual but unmistakable. The distant earth began to blur even more. The clouds, nearer to them now, gave their real sense of movement. The wind at their backs drove them faster, ever faster.

“This is faster than a hippogriff!” Deor called back, and Kelat laughed.

“That ridiculous cart you were riding?” Ambrosia called forward.

“No—actual hippogriff.”

“What a liar you are, Deor. When did you ever ride a hippogriff?”

Deor ignored the fact that his harven-kin had made a remark that, under Thrymhaiam, would have entitled him to kill her with impunity. They were not under Thrymhaiam, and Ambrosia never had been. Instead, he and Kelat told her the tale, which involved telling other tales.

The wind at their backs held all through the day. They worked the pedals and manuals sometimes, to build up charges in the impulse wells and to give their arms and legs something to do: there was no room to move about the little gondola.

When the sun set, the wind faded. It did not quite disappear, and it was difficult in the dark to say how much they had slowed.

“Should we set down?” Deor called back. “Anchor and, er, stretch our legs?”

“No,” Ambrosia said firmly. “It’s not like we’re going to crash into anything. Any progress is better than no progress; we have a long road before us.”

“But . . . I mean. . . .”

“And if ‘stretch your legs’ is some kind of Dwarvish euphemism, then I encourage you to swing your ass over the side and let go.”

“Madam.”

“Deor. Should I have put it more sweetly?”

“No! I suppose you’re right.”

“I’ll go first, if you gentlemen don’t mind. I should relieve Morlock, but I have to relieve myself first.”

“Only one of us is a man, madam, but I don’t suppose we object.”

Actually, Deor thought he could hear Kelat goggling from where he sat, two benches back, but the young fellow would have to come to terms with life’s undignified details sooner or later.

“Thanks, all. You make up in gentility what you lack in humanity.” She kicked off her underclothing and climbed over the side to relieve herself while Deor and Kelat looked politely away and Liyurriu watched with patient interest. When she was back aboard and dressing herself she said, “Carry on, gentles. I think we should go one at a time, lest we overbalance.”

Or in balanced pairs, Deor almost suggested . . . but that might be impossible. Since his fellow males seemed disinclined to take the plunge, Deor skinned off his trousers and climbed over the edge of the gondola.

Now it was his turn to be watched with shameless and unflinching interest by the werewolf Liyurriu. It made concentrating on the task at hand almost impossible. Then Liyurriu reached forward and grabbed Deor’s forearms with his apish hands. Deor was so startled he almost lost his grip—and then he realized the werewolf was doing his best to help.

Deor appreciated it. He was terrified of falling. But Trumpeter, the minor moon, was standing in the western sky right behind him, shining with bitter brightness directly into the werewolf’s eyes. Deor felt he was making an unpleasant spectacle of himself. But mounting terror, in the end, came to his aid and he evacuated his bowels and bladder and climbed back aboard while his gifts were still speeding their way toward the distant earth.

“And this is the worst,” he shouted back to Morlock. “The worst. Nothing on this trip will be worse than this, not if we die the second death.”

Morlock, by now returned from visionary rapture, but just barely, said, “Eh.” The fact that he was four benches back saved Deor from the guilt of kinslaying.

Morlock was groggily aware that Deor was angry at him, but he wasn’t really sure why. He hoped it wasn’t important. Perhaps Deor was simply backing into anger to avoid fear. If that were so, Morlock would fight all night with his harven-kin, once he shook the shadows from his head.

They drifted northward through a dark sea of air, past towering islands and continents of cloud, bright as the major moons in the west, blue and mysterious as Deor’s mood in the east.

Morlock answered the call of nature with the only reply possible, and ate and drank sparingly from the stores in his pack. Kelat had cocooned himself in a sleeping cloak, and Morlock felt much inclined to follow his lead and do the same. Visionary rapture was not sleep, despite how it seemed to onlookers, and Morlock was deeply weary.

But there was something he must attend to first.

He climbed onto his bench and stepped across to Kelat’s. The Vraid started and pulled back the hood of his sleeping cloak to peer curiously at Morlock.

“You,” Morlock said to the werewolf on the next bench. “What are you, really?”

The wolvish face looked on him, its reflective eyes as bright as little moons. After a moment, it opened its jaws and said carefully, “Liyurriu.”

“I didn’t ask your name,” Morlock said. “Though I don’t doubt you are lying to me about that. I asked what you are.”

The wolvish eyes looked at him. The wolvish mouth did not answer him.

“You may not speak this language,” Morlock said. (He was speaking the vulgar Ontilian they used in Narkunden and Aflraun.) “But I think you understand it. You showed me you did when you told me your name just now. Do you understand me?”

Liyurriu did not say anything, but after a moment he nodded curtly.

“Will you tell me what you are?” Morlock asked.

Hesitantly, the wolvish head shook: no.

“Will you tell me why you are here?”

Liyurriu shook his head again—reluctantly, it seemed to Morlock, but definitely.

“Is it because you cannot? I can see that you might be able to understand a language but not speak it. We can bring Ambrosia out of her vision so that she can translate. Or you can tell her rather than me. Will you?”

A long pause. Liyurriu closed his moonbright eyes, opened them. A slow shake of the head.

“Then.” Morlock reached down and grabbed the werewolf by the scruff of his hairy neck.

“Morlock, no!” Deor screamed.

When Liyurriu realized what Morlock was about, he slashed with his claws and snapped with his jaws, but Morlock easily avoided these dangers and tossed Liyurriu off the airship. The werewolf body fell, writhing like a snake but silent as a stone, into a bank of cloud and out of sight.

Deor roared and grabbed for Morlock, as if he would send him by the same path. Morlock stepped back to his own bench and sat down.

“Are you completely crazy?” shouted Deor, and Kelat, too, was looking at him as if he were a dangerous lunatic.

“Kelat,” he said. “Harven Deor.”

“Am I harven to a murderer?” Deor continued, hardly less loud than before. “What in the Canyon do you think you are doing? Which one of us will you throw out next?”

“None of you,” Morlock said. “As for Liyurriu, he is not what he seems. He should never have been with us.”

Deor glared at him for a while, saying nothing. Morlock met his gaze and said nothing more.

Kelat finally broke the silence, saying, “What do you mean? Liyurriu was not a werewolf?”

“Eh.”

Deor unleashed a thunderblast of semicoherent Dwarvish profanity.

Morlock ignored him and addressed himself to Kelat. “Your question does not have a yes or no answer. Liyurriu, as you may think of him, did not exist.”

Kelat sat back and pondered this.

“Do you mean he was a mere illusion?” Deor said in a more nearly reasonable voice. “Impossible, Morlock. He did work on this airship. He—” Deor’s voice choked off and he turned away.

“His physical presence was real,” Morlock said, “but it was not inhabited by a mind. Not as your bodies are—as mine is.”

“What do you mean?” Deor demanded. “What can that mean?”

“His body was simply a sort of puppet, controlled by another mind far distant from here. A seer of great power.”

“Who? Why?” Deor demanded.

“That was what I wanted to know,” Morlock reminded him. “It is what Liyurriu would not say.”

Kelat asked, “Did you see it in your vision? Is that how you know?”

“Yes.” In his mind he could still see the tethers of talic force glimmering through the world, east and south. That was where the puppeteer of Liyurriu-puppet was.

“Why didn’t Lady Ambrosia know it?”

“She has long known it, I think.”

“Then she must have had some purpose in concealing it. Shouldn’t you have . . . er . . . consulted with her?”

Morlock reflected briefly and said, “No.”

Kelat reflected briefly and then climbed into the now empty bench behind Deor.

Morlock shrugged. It was no skin off his walrus. If it helped the boy sleep better, then it was all to the good. He wrapped himself in a cloak and courted sleep. It came quickly, and he was wrapped in a darkly golden dream where he lay beside his darkly golden wife, when his sleep was shattered by Deor’s voice.

“Whazzit?” he said, or words to that effect.

Deor was sitting in the bench Kelat had vacated, leaning over so that his head was near to Morlock’s.

“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.

“Deortheorn,” Morlock replied.

“Why did you give the knowledge of goldmaking to the Narkundans?”

“Ah.” It was an unexpected question, but his harven-kin deserved a fair answer. He thought it over for a while and said, “I was angry at those smug pink parasites.”

“Excuse me?”

“Those teachers who hated teaching, swarming around the stationer’s shop, talking about money as if it were virtue, arguing fine points of grammar while others were starving.”

“Oh. Oh. I shall have to apologize to Ambrosia, I think.”

“About what?”

“We had an argument about something, and I’m beginning to see her point a little.”

“She usually has one,” Morlock said.

“Yes. Do you think Liyurriu is dead?”

“The entity who was using Liyurriu is not dead. The body may or may not survive the fall.”

“We’re miles in the air, Morlock.”

“Werewolves drink strength and health from moonlight, it’s said, and Trumpeter is bright tonight. But there is no Liyurriu, Deor. That person does not exist.”

“Eh,” said Deor pointedly, and climbed past the snoring Kelat to his own bench.

Morlock shrugged, descended again into the depths of his cloak and sleep. His dreams this time were dark and cold, and Aloê showed herself in none of them.