Текст книги "The Wide World's End"

Автор книги: James Enge

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Wreck of the Viviana

They flew the blood-warm wind from the dying sun northward, day after day. At night they drifted. Sometimes they drove the propellers with the pedals and manuals to have something to do and to keep warm. Sometimes they talked, although infrequently. They watched the distant land and the bright ring of the horizon and they waited for the end—of their journey, of the world.

They saw below them a great tidal wave of beasts fleeing from the bitter blue death that roamed the north. From their airship miles above they could see it, black, brown, and red against the pitiless white and silver of snow and ice.

North of the great migration, there were still shapes moving in the wild, wind-carved wastes of snow, but they could not quite see them or understand what they saw.

And there was a long, straight line running ahead of them, all the way to the northern horizon. When they talked, they talked a little about that.

“You know what it is,” Ambrosia said eventually. (Morlock was in trance, keeping the Viviana aloft.)

“I do not know what it is,” Deor replied emphatically.

“It’s the weight of the sun’s death. It’s the footprint in the snow of the warm air we’re riding north.”

“Ah,” said Deor and Kelat in chorus and with equal satisfaction.

The Ambrosii grew hollow-eyed. It was hard to spend much of a day in visionary rapture, day after day. It made the soul’s relationship to the body more tenuous. If the bond finally broke, that was death. They were not about to die. But they were not well either.

One day, around noon, Deor said, “We’re lower than we were. Are the gasbags getting cold?”

Morlock looked up into the body of the airship. The glass furnace was still burning its fuel. He looked back at Ambrosia. Though deep in vision, she looked at him with eyes closed, the dim glow of her irises visible through the lids. She shook her head. And the ship still seemed to be buoyant.

“Unlikely,” Morlock said. He glanced all the way around the horizon and added, “Look north.”

“The sky seems . . . bigger there,” Deor called back. “Or the land higher.”

“The sunstream is dropping down—carrying us closer to the Soul Bridge?” Kelat asked.

“Likely,” Morlock said.

He wondered if the very sky curved down at the edge of the world, closing in the world’s air like a glass bowl enclosing water. The idea gave him a breathless, locked-in feeling that he disliked strongly. He said nothing of this, however.

As Viviana flew lower, they could see the wild beasts of the snow fields better. But it was hard to understand what they saw. Many shapes were white-on-white, their borders hard to distinguish. Others glittered like glass in the bitter, pale sun.

“Are those plants?” wondered Kelat, as they flew past a dense, tangled chaos of bitterly bright ice things.

“Of course!” Deor said. And Morlock agreed: it was very like a forest seen from above, except that it was a forest after an ice storm, with no green or brown to be seen. There were skeletal shapes of black, though—very like thin tree trunks and bare, wintry branches.

“What kind of creatures would feed on such plants?” Kelat wondered.

“Ice-bunnies?” speculated Deor. “Frost-deer?”

“And who feeds on the ice-bunnies?”

“Us, maybe. A nice frost-bunny stew sounds good right about now, doesn’t it?”

“Not really, no.”

Morlock noticed that the glittering plants did not grow near the narrow road leading into the deep north. Nor did the hulking white shapes tend to travel there.

“What’s that?” Deor called back, pointing to the east. “Quake sign?”

Morlock looked at a long, serpentine break in the snow crust. “Hope so,” he called back. But he didn’t think so. Fault lines from an earthquake would have been more angular.

Later, when Morlock was in trance, keeping the Viviana aloft, Deor made some reference to “throwing more of us off the airship.”

Ambrosia, who had stepped past Morlock to talk to the other males, said, “You’re still angry with Morlock about Liyurriu?”

Deor was taken aback. After a moment he answered, “Yes.”

“You realize there is no Liyurriu? He was simply a fraud, sent to beguile us?”

Deor said slowly, “If you say so.”

“I do say so. It stood out like Chariot in a cloudless winter sky when you looked at him in the talic realm.”

Deor lowered his head. He was remembering the werewolf sewing beside him—holding his arms when he was hanging outside the gondola. It had felt as if there was someone behind those moonslit eyes. “Why didn’t you notice it, then?” Deor asked. He could hear the anger in his own voice, but he couldn’t keep it out.

“Of course I noticed it. I suspected it when we met, and confirmed it that first night, when I stood watch while you were all sleeping.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I thought Liyurriu might be useful. Even an enemy can be useful, if you know him for what he is. And it was not clear that Liyurriu (or his puppeteer, rather) was an enemy.”

“Then Morlock was wrong.”

“I didn’t say so. He doesn’t trust people who lie to him; it’s a fool who does. Liyurriu could have been sent by someone who wants the world to end, to wait until we were vulnerable, then turn on us and kill us.”

“Who would want that?”

“The people Morlock calls the Sunkillers.”

“Surely there are none in our world? That’s why we are going to find theirs.”

“It’s not sure at all, Deortheorn, if I may call you so.”

“Harven.”

“There was one in the world, our world. I’m pretty sure there was. The Balancer, the unbeing that lived in the Waste Lands. Did Aloê ever tell you about it?”

“I heard something about it,” Deor admitted.

“It had a relationship with the Two Powers. It was to keep them working, engaged in the destruction of the world. It was some plot of the Sunkillers, who lived in our world before the sun was born, and ached to return. That plot failed; this is another attempt, it would seem.”

Deor thought long about this. “So you think Liyurriu was sent by them, or one of them—by the Sunkillers?”

“No, I don’t. I doubt one of them would trouble to learn the night speech of werewolves, for instance. But what if I were wrong? I was willing to take the risk; Morlock wasn’t. A difference of opinion.”

“And of method.”

“Because he acted arrogantly and alone, without saying a word to anyone? So did I, you know. And he gave Liyurriu, or whoever was pulling Liyurriu’s strings, a chance to speak up. Whoever they are, they should not have tried to bandy words with Morlock Ambrosius.”

There was an implied rebuke there, Deor decided. If the stranger behind the Liyurriu-mask should have not bandied words with Morlock, still less should his harven-kin, perhaps. And, if he was going to do it, he might as well do it to his kinsman’s face.

He turned away from Ambrosia and his own thoughts and looked off Viviana’s left bow . . . “port” they’d say on a sea ship, although he never understood why.

There was a glittering ice-forest there, running west as far as Deor could see. They were flying low enough now that he could see things moving among the crystalline leaves. Icy birds? Perhaps. He couldn’t quite catch their shapes.

Ambrosia and Kelat continued to talk in low tones behind him. They were not saying much, but the way they were saying it made him wonder if they would be mating soon. He hoped they wouldn’t do it in the Viviana. He never enjoyed witnessing the mating of the Other Ilk—it was so violent, so hard to distinguish from an act of hate.

In the event, he found that he need not have worried. The Viviana had not long to live.

The first sign came that night.

Morlock was awake; Ambrosia was in trance. Deor had thought and thought and thought about what she had said to him earlier. So he nerved himself to stand up on his bench.

The moonslit snows below were bright as a skull’s teeth, ready to devour him if he fell.

He sneered at them and gently stepped onto the bench where Kelat was snoring. The boy didn’t waken.

Ambrosia was still sitting on the bench behind Kelat. Her closed eyes glowed eerily in trance. Even more eerily: she raised her right hand in greeting as he passed. Morlock couldn’t do that in rapture. If Noreê or Illion or any of the great seers of the Wardlands could do it, Deor had never seen it. But it was effortless for Ambrosia. He raised his own in reply.

“Excuse me,” he said gruffly, as he stepped past Morlock’s bench, and then he seated himself on the vacant bench behind Morlock.

Morlock was enjoying some dry bread, salted meat, and a mold-speckled slab of pale, crumbly cheese. He held his hands out to Deor, silently offering to share.

Deor took a piece off the moldy end of the cheese. They sat there, chewing and not talking. Deor enjoyed a good talk, but he had grown up among seven clans of dwarves whose notions of conversation more nearly approximated Morlock’s. And it was easeful to sit there, not saying anything because nothing needed to be said.

Then: something needed to be said.

Chariot shone brightly over the western horizon, and Horseman stood high overhead, eclipsed by Viviana’s bulk but adding its light to the world. Except for color, it was nearly as bright as day . . . and in this northern icescape there was little color to be seen.

So Deor saw quite clearly when a cloud of the fluttering things left the ice-forests below and arrowed toward low-flying Viviana.

“Morlock!” Deor shouted, and pointed.

Morlock looked, saw, stood. “Rouse Kelat and my sister, if you can.” He ran forward recklessly, drawing his sword as he went. He stood on the prow of the gondola, his sword, bright with reflected moonslight, in his right hand; his left hand grasped the rigging.

Deor followed with more cautious speed. His shout woke the already twitching Kelat. Deor turned to look at Ambrosia, wondering what to do. He feared to touch her, lest he be drawn into her vision. Also, he had to admit to himself, he simply feared to touch her.

She raised both her hands now. He took that to mean, Stop. I know what I’m doing. He didn’t doubt it. The Ambrosii always knew what they were doing. But they didn’t seem to ever know what the other was doing.

Deor turned to look outboard of Viviana’s gondola.

The flying things were nearer now, the nearest ones enough to see. They weren’t like birds—more like insects. They had great membranous wings that flapped so swiftly that they seemed to glow in the moonslight. Heads with many eyes, glittering like polished diamonds, turned on their narrow necks jerkily, as if moved by ill-made gears. Their long, curving bodies were filled with some dark sloshing fluid, clearly visible through the transparent chitinous plates they had for skin. They kept their long, spiny legs folded up over their great bellies, like self-satisfied club men after a good dinner. At the end of each broad tail was a long, glittering sting.

The foremost was heading straight for Morlock. Of course it was.

Deor watched, motionless, as the crystal beast arrowed in, swinging the fat weight of its body to direct the sting at Morlock. Then the dark fluid in its center seemed to boil, and a jet of it came out of the sting as it drove it to strike.

Morlock dodged the sting and its venom, if that’s what it was.

The dark fluid fell among the ropes. The ropes stiffened and shattered like glass.

Morlock slashed with Tyrfing and shattered the icy wing of the beast.

It tumbled away in the night, silent, strangely like Liyurriu, striking a few of its fellows and taking them with it as it went, but there were more, so many more.

Then all of Deor’s ancestors roared in his ears. He was a Theorn of Theorn clan, and his harven-kin was fighting for his life—for all their lives. So what if it was futile? So what if they all died? No dwarf lives forever.

He seized his axe and flourished it. “Ath, rokhlan!”

“Ath! Ath!” Morlock replied. He waved his sword at the moon in the west. “Khai, gradara!”

Deor leaped forward to stand beside Morlock on the prow, now swinging a little because of the shattered ropes.

Ambrosia spoke. “Ware impulse!” her toneless, entranced voice said.

Morlock and Deor had time to look at each other when the airship lurched forward.

They tumbled together back onto the empty bench at the front of the gondola.

There was a humming in the night: the Viviana’s propellers were spinning. Ambrosia was releasing the pent up energy of the impulse wells.

The cloud of icy insects was left behind, glittering in Viviana’s airy wake.

Deor, looking back, shook his free hand at them and shouted derisively.

Morlock tapped his shoulder and pointed ahead.

Another cloud of icy insects was rising to approach their prow.

“Gleh,” said Deor.

“Yes,” said Morlock. He jumped up on the bench and swarmed up a surviving rope using his feet and his left hand. As Deor watched, open-mouthed and uncomprehending, he swung Tyrfing with deadly force, shattering the keel of the airship and severing its fabric envelope. He climbed up onto the broken keel and slashed again and again. He shattered the glass furnace, scattering its long-burning maijarra coals among the ulken-cloth gasbags and the gondola. Gasbags were drifting away in the dark air.

“Deor! Kelat!” he called down. “Come on!”

Someone using Deor’s voice said, in a remarkably cool tone, “Come on and do what exactly, harven?”

“Grab a gasbag and ride it down to the ground.”

Of course. Of course. Deor looked about him sourly. Ambrosia was already swarming up the ropes. Kelat saw this and immediately followed suit.

The gondola was burning. The gasbags in the Viviana’s heart were afire. Ice-spewing crystal insects the color of moonslight were closing in on them from all sides. This was not the time to calmly discuss alternatives. If they had been just a little lower, Deor would have jumped, and to Canyon with the gasbags and Morlock’s kindly meant suggestion. But they were still high enough to kill a falling dwarf. Deor thrust the axe handle into his belt and climbed up the ropes. He grabbed the first gasbag he came across. (Was it a good one? How could he tell?) He kicked off from the Viviana and drifted away into the moonslit void.

He was the first away. Morlock was still busy hacking away at the airship’s shell. Ambrosia and Kelat were quarrelling about something. Irritably, Ambrosia seized a gasbag and drifted away from the dying airship. Kelat followed, gripping the seam of a gasbag with one hand, his sword with the other. Morlock at last grabbed a gasbag and kicked off.

The Viviana was now heeling badly, lit with internal fire in the bitter, night-blue air. Burning balloons were leaking from her wounded belly. The clouds of ice insects met her in midair and attacked.

Then, and only then, did Deor understand what Morlock had done. Abandoning the airship and scattering burning globes through the night air gave some cover for their escape.

Away from the glass furnace and the kindly tending of the seers, the bitter night air cooled Deor’s gasbag quickly. His descent became something more like a fall. Soon he let go of the balloon and tossed his axe well away from him so that he would not disembowel himself on impact. The bone-white ground leapt up at him, and he committed himself to the care of his ancestors.

The surface was so soft that he didn’t even feel his boots strike it. He passed from a world of moonslight to a world of darkness in an instant. He ground to a halt, not because his boots had struck earth at last; his fall simply seemed to have compacted a little island in the snow.

Deor took a cautious breath. There was little air to breathe: the snow had collapsed around him and he was quite thoroughly buried, perhaps to a depth that was twice his height, perhaps more—certainly not less.

But now he knew what he was doing. He started making a way for himself with his hands and feet, compressing snow, making a kind of slope to crawl out of the hole. It took time, but he wasn’t worried. It was no worse than travelling over the glaciers of Mundjokull, though perhaps a little colder. A lot colder. No matter: he knew what to do and he did it. On the way up he came across his axe. It made him heavier, but he was glad to see it.

He broke back to the surface at last, after many a recollapse of the snow around him. The wind-carved crust of snow was very tenuous, but it could hold him if he stretched out his weight carefully.

He saw three other snowholes with floundering figures in them: his comrades.

Beyond them all, encircled by glittering clouds of ice-bugs, the Viviana fell from the night-blue sky. Horseman, rising in the west, lit her with fierce light; beyond her in the eastern sky, Trumpeter seemed to watch somberly. Her front section completely empty of balloons, the rear section in flames, she dropped prow first toward the snowy fields and crashed, the remains of her wooden framework and gondola screaming on impact before silence fell, even the fires silent, quenched by the bitter, moonblue snow.

Deor watched it all through a haze of tears. He had hated the journey on the Viviana more than any other he had ever taken. But she was the work of their hands and minds, fearfully and cunningly made with great labor, and she had died protecting them. He wiped the tears away and snarled at himself for a fool. But he did not look away until the fires were gone and the ice insects had flown off again.

Deor crawled across the surface crust to where Morlock and Ambrosia were arising from their own impact craters, crooked shadows in the moonslit snow.

“What now, Ambrosii?” he called.

“The wreck of the Viviana,” said the shadow with Morlock’s voice.

Of course. Their packs, if they could recover them.

“And maybe we can salvage some of her for snowshoes,” he said, thinking aloud.

“A good thought,” Morlock said.

Deor looked at the ruins of the Viviana, half sunk in snowdrifts.

“She was a brave ship,” he said, and—Canyon keep it!—his voice broke in mid-sentence.

The shadow that was Ambrosia turned to look at him. “Yes,” she said. “I should have known better than to name her after a woman so mortal and so crazy. But maybe that’s why she was so brave.”

“Could be,” said Deor with Morlockian gruffness, and crawled off to help Kelat out of his snow pit.

CHAPTER SIX

The Narrow Road

to the Deep North

Their packs survived more or less intact. Morlock and Ambrosia had placed fire-quell magic on them, as they did out of habit with most things they wore, and the only losses were from the crash. In Morlock’s, for instance, the impact had shattered a jar of some horrible mushroom liquor he had received as a gift from the Blackthorn masters of making.

“Eh,” said Morlock. “I could have used a drink.”

“You drink too much, harven,” Deor said.

Morlock shrugged and turned away to harvest fabric and wood for snowshoes.

They each made their own snowshoes, even Kelat, who proved to be quite good at it.

“If you couldn’t make snowshoes and walk away,” he explained to Deor, “you were trapped all winter long with the other Uthars.”

“But it can’t snow so very much on the north shore of the Sea of Stones, where Uthartown is,” Deor objected.

“Uthartown is wherever the Uthars are. It must have had fifteen different locations that I can remember.”

“Sixteen since you were born,” Ambrosia interjected.

Deor’s eyes crossed at this and Morlock smiled to himself. Deor understood travel, and tolerated it fairly well, but the idea of a home that was not always in the same place: that was unthinkable to many a dwarf.

Morlock cut cloth from the shell of the Viviana and made it into face masks for each of them.

Ambrosia and Deor took theirs without comment, but Kelat objected. “I don’t like things on my face—I don’t care how cold it gets.”

“Your face cares,” Morlock retorted. “We are nearing the edge of the world, where men may not dwell.”

“Even Deor and I don’t like it much,” Ambrosia said. Kelat laughed, and did not put on his mask. The others did, though.

The track of the sunstream was easy to read on the moonslit face of the snowy plain, and they shuffled across the empty white fields to reach it.

The snow crust there was deeper and more stable. They pitched camp for the night.

“We should have brought firewood from the Viviana,” Kelat said.

“No fires on this trip,” Morlock said.

“What keeps us from freezing at night?”

“You will, Prince Uthar,” Ambrosia said. “You’re a furnace, burning fuel night and day. Did you know it? All we need do is contain the heat that you, and I, and the others here generate as a matter of course. Morlock or I can shepherd that heat, keeping it within a shelter, as we kept it in the balloons of the Viviana.”

Kelat looked relieved at this, but Deor gave a sidelong glance and said, “I don’t like it, harvenen. Long watches in the visionary realm are a burden you have already born to your harm. Kelat and I will go fetch some firewood.”

Ambrosia said flatly, “No. We can’t carry firewood enough to last us to the edge of the world, and we’re unlikely to find any on the road, unless you think you can make a bonfire out of ice-trees. This is the only way, Deortheorn,” she added in a gentler tone.

“There’s another way,” Deor said stubbornly. “Share your burden. Teach us how to do it.”

Morlock met Ambrosia’s eye. She nodded briskly. “The Sight is a treacherous gift for a ruler,” she said. “But harven Deor has a point.”

“I always have a point,” Deor admitted, “though I usually manage to stab myself with it.”

They set up their occlusion and ran a census on their food. It wasn’t much to reach the end of the world with, much less to walk all the way back.

Deor said to Kelat, whose face fell approximately one face-length when he saw how small the rations would be, “Well, look on the bright side. We may not have to walk back.”

“Because we’ll be dead, you mean?” Kelat said calmly. “That might be just as well. Starvation’s an ugly death.”

Morlock was impressed with the youth’s steadiness. He did childish things, like refuse to wear a face mask in the coldest air in the world. But he was not a child.

“If it comes to that,” Morlock said, “there are ways to survive without food.”

Deor stared at him. “Oh?”

“Yes. We might absorb the tal of the local beasts and plants directly. It would keep life in our bodies, anyway.”

“What’s the downside? I can tell by your face there’s a downside.”

“It may change our bodies.”

“Ach. Well, troubles never come singly.”

“And a stitch in time saves nine.”

“A stitch or nine is exactly what you’ll need when I’m done with you, harven,” Deor said mildly.

They each ate something and then Ambrosia and Kelat wrapped themselves in their sleeping cloaks and lay back to back. Deor stayed awake for a while and Morlock took him through the first lessons of the Sight. It did not go as badly as it might have, and Morlock was strangely moved to think that his harven-kin and oldest friend might become a dwarvish seer—a rare thing in the world, if not absolutely unheard of.

Morlock watched intermittently all through the night. The occlusion, in fact, trapped most of their heat, but he set a sentinel mannikin to wake him every few hours to make sure the shelter had not grown too cold.

When day came they struck camp without eating and began the long walk northward on the narrow road paved with ice and the sun’s death. The cleft of the road was always before them; their path ran a little below the level of the snow fields, and there was often drifting snow to contend with. The day was but little warmer than the night; the heat drawn away from the sun seemed mostly to stay aloft. Kelat rarely wore his face mask but Morlock didn’t warn him again; he was not the boy’s mother.

They walked, with a few breaks, until sunset. Then they made camp, ate a little, and Kelat and Ambrosia stayed up while Morlock and Deor turned in.

And that was how it went: day after day in the endless plain of snow and ice. The biggest difference most days was in who would hold the watch at night.

They talked some as they walked. But, in truth, a time came when they had said most of what they had to say to each other, and each walked with his or her own thoughts.

Morlock’s daydreams largely focused on Aloê. Rarely in their marriage had they been apart so long or so far. His longing for her was by now the principal concern of his waking life. It dwarfed hunger, thirst, cold, and fear. The hope of her, the golden warmth of the thought of her, kept him moving. The only way back to her was ahead. His long, regular strides were like the beat of a song, a song that had one word: Aloê . . . Aloê . . . Aloê. . . .

It was not all monotony, though. Occasionally, there were monsters.

One day they found they had passed from the flat, snowy plains to a bumpier region of snow-covered hills. The hills bristled with black-hearted ice trees. The bloodless sun above lit the hills with searing brightness. Morlock drew his mask over his eyes and stared down at the ground. So he wasn’t the first to see it.

“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said at his elbow. “One of those hills is moving.”

Morlock looked up and saw: a hill that stood just to the left of their path lurched up from the ground. They could see sky beneath it through three stumpy legs or roots that still touched the ground.

“Is it a plant?” wondered Deor. “Or . . . ?”

It pulled one of its legs loose from the ground. The leg looked oddly like one of the trees on the beast’s back: crystalline and spiky, veined with darkness.

A second leg came loose, and then the third.

Morlock remembered shapes he had not understood when seen from the air: vast hill-sized shapes moving through the snow. This. These, rather: they should assume that all the hills were the three-legged hulking beasts.

It took a step, and the ground shook. The step was toward them.

“Move,” said Ambrosia, but they were all moving already.

Now more hills were shaking, streams of snow flying off them in the wind like strands of white hair.

“Think they eat things like us?” Deor speculated.

“Does it matter, if they kill us first?” Kelat replied.

“It may to them. Think how disappointed they’ll be! ‘Oh, no! Dwarf-meat again!’”

“That what your mother used to say, you think?”

Deor glanced at Morlock, rolled his eyes, and laughed with (it seemed to Morlock) ostentatious politeness. Morlock decided he should tell Kelat about dwarvish family life so that he could make his banter more on point.

The hillbeast who had first awakened was moving faster now—as fast as they were, shuffling along on their snowshoes. It seemed to be picking up speed as it went, and now there were others bumbling along behind it. The hillbeasts on the eastern side of the road were trundling into motion also.

“Should we kick these shoes off?” Ambrosia, who was in the lead, called back.

Morlock had been thinking the same thing, but on impulse he shouted back, “No!” He waited a moment for his half-formed idea to emerge fully into being and then continued, “Slow start; slow stop.”

“Right!” Ambrosia called back after another moment. She leaped off the narrow road to the north and ran westward through the field of shuddering beasts.

“Deor! With her! Kelat, with me!” Morlock shouted. He leaped off the road, running eastward.

The cold—cruel enough on the snowy road carved by the sun’s death—bit deeper than ever in the snowy fields. Morlock was glad of his mask—wished for something better. He wondered if impulse wells could be adapted to turn impulses into heat. Hm. . . . If you put impulse collectors in the shoes. . . .

A hillbeast roared behind him. Once, in a very different land than this, Morlock had heard an elephant scream when it stepped on a poisoned stake. If a thousand elephants made of glass had stepped on four thousand poisoned stakes, it might have sounded something like the hillbeast’s rage.

“What are we doing?” Kelat wondered aloud, shuffling along beside him.

Morlock looked at Kelat, noticed something about his face, decided it wasn’t the time to mention it. “We’re sowing confusion,” he said, and jabbed a thumb over his lower shoulder.

Kelat spun about and gasped. He grabbed Morlock’s arm and Morlock halted, looking over his shoulder.

One of the hillbeasts pursuing them had blundered against a hillbeast that was just beginning to rouse itself. The hillbeast in motion staggered back and raised the long lip of its gigantic body, exposing the vast mouth between its spiny root-like legs. The mouth had no teeth, but it did display a long, snakelike, thorny tongue. It screamed its thousand-glass-elephants-in-agony scream and stabbed the offending hillbeast through its side with the long, indefinitely extensible tongue. Black matter spurted out of the wound, and the attacker rolled its tongue in and out of the wound, slurping up the clumpy black fluid, whatever it was. Now the offending hillbeast, offended, struggled to its rooty feet and stabbed its attacker with its own tongue.

The beasts about them were rising up also.

“Come,” said Morlock. “We’ll run until we have pursuers and double back—”

“I see!” shouted Kelat, evidently delighted, although his face didn’t change expression much.

They ran back and forth for much of the day, sowing chaos among the hillbeasts. Sometimes they caught sight of Ambrosia and Deor doing the same. But as the sun began eastering, Morlock led Kelat away northward through the fields, successfully avoiding the attention of the hillbeasts, who were mostly busy feeding on each other.

They saw Deor and Ambrosia running parallel to them on the far side of the road. As dusk rose, blue from the earth, into the sky, they met on the road and set up occlusions for shelter.

The others wanted to talk about the adventures of the day, but Morlock overrode them all, saying to Kelat, “Let’s have a look at your face.”

Startled, Kelat raised a gloved hand to his face. “What’s wrong with it? It doesn’t hurt.”

“Feel anything?” Morlock asked.

“Uh. . . . No.”

“It’s frostbite,” Ambrosia confirmed, looking at the hard, white skin that showed wherever his golden beard didn’t. “Oh, Uthar.”

“Sit down,” Morlock directed. “Take your gloves off and hold your hands over your face.”

Ambrosia sat next to him and closed her eyes. In moments she was in visionary rapture.