Текст книги "The Wide World's End"

Автор книги: James Enge

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

She pushed the feeling away. The food came then, and she managed to ask Naevros a few more questions through the meal, but she didn’t learn much, and she was increasingly convinced that she never would learn more from Naevros.

After the meal the two vocates parted company with Naevros and rode westward to the lockhouse in Fungustown.

“Would your father say Naevros was a real man?” Aloê said, breaking a long silence.

“Unquestionably. Why?”

“He seems the mirror image of Ulvana. He killed and lied and betrayed every trust so that he could have what he wanted.”

“A hero’s mantle, you mean? Yes, I agree with you there.”

“And what good would it have been to him if he had it?” Aloê asked. She felt the cool pressure of Noreê’s regard and turned toward the older woman. “Do you mean this was really about me? He was trying to impress me?”

Noreê laughed in surprise. “Your insight is sharp, Vocate. That is what I almost said. But I didn’t say it because, on second thought, it seems to me too superficial. Naevros always seems to have a woman against whom he measures himself and whom he tries to impress. If it weren’t you, it would be someone else. If you had ever yielded to his charms he would have despised you the way he does every woman he has seduced, and he would have found some other bitch-goddess to pray to.”

“I don’t like that term applied to me,” Aloê said quietly.

“I don’t, Vocate. I apply it to his idea of you.”

Aloê thought she was right and yet not all right. Still, it was a trivial matter to waste the dying sun’s light on.

They arrived at the lockhouse to see Bleys. He was the last Guardian in the lockup; Lernaion, Naevros, and the thains had all sworn self-binding oaths to appear at Station; only Bleys had refused.

The thains at the lockhouse door were divided among the purple-legging crowd, the red-cap crowd, the green-armband crowd, and some thains who had not yet been branded by their masters.

“Guardians,” said Aloê, “do not hinder me or Noreê or any vocate going about her self-set tasks, and you may remain. If you challenge me, you will curse the day you chose to pledge yourself to the Graith.”

“That is agreeable with our orders, Vocate Aloê,” said one of the green armbanders, and the rest of the gray-caped chickens took up the chorus: orders-squawk-orders-squawk.

Aloê dismounted in their midst, waded through them, leading Raudhfax by the reins, and finally tied up her palfrey outside the lockhouse.

Noreê left her horse in custody of one of the unmarked thains—one of her own, no doubt—and strode through the crowd to follow Aloê inside.

“Some of the other vocates disliked the thought that I had sole mastery of the prisoners,” she explained, “so they recruited their own thains and sent them to assist.”

“You see what you’ve started. Will every vocate now have a personal army of thains to do her bidding?”

“Perhaps they should,” Noreê said good-humoredly. “This is only for the emergency, Aloê.”

“After this one there will be another.”

“Perhaps.” Noreê seemed determined not to fight with her, so Aloê gave up—for the moment.

The entrance to the basement was guarded by thains with an ill-assorted rainbow of badges. Aloê brushed them aside and descended, taking a coldlight from a pocket of her cloak as she descended the crumbling stairs to the basement.

A dizzying wave of stink swept over her. The sting of urine was in her eyes and nose, and it wasn’t the most alarming thread in the reek. . . .

She took the songbow from her shoulder and gripped it in her hand like a club. The hot smell of fresh blood rode the foul air.

The chaos of the basement made no sense to her eye at first. She had stumbled over a bundle of something at her feet before she realized it was a bundle of limbs—a Khnauront, lying on its side, its throat cut from ear to ear.

“Call your thains,” Aloê said over her shoulder.

“Oh, there’s no need for that, Vocate,” said Bleys’ warm voice from across the dim basement.

Aloê lifted the coldlight high to see better and caught sight of the summoner across the floor of the basement, strewn with dead Khnauronts. He was holding a bright piece of metal in one hand and with the other was pulling at the nose of a Khnauront to expose his bare neck. Two quick slashes and the Khnauront was spraying blood, dark in the bluish light. Bleys released him and he fell on his side.

The summoner stepped over to where the last Khnauront was sitting upright, his back against the far wall. He looked at Bleys and his bloody little piece of metal incuriously.

“Don’t!” shouted Aloê.

“With you in a moment, my dears,” called Bleys cheerily. He slashed the throat of the last Khnauront and let him fall. He dropped the piece of metal beside the dying body and then picked his way carefully across the carnage toward the thunderstruck vocates.

“You don’t need to thank me,” Bleys said, as he got nearer. “Although I don’t think it would be a good idea to take my hands.” He held them up: they gleamed with blood. “After a few days of probing their minds, I determined that these objects could be no use to themselves or anyone else, and decided to get rid of them . . . since the Graith, in its usual way, could not decide what to do with them.”

Aloê exhaled, then, more reluctantly, inhaled.

“I assure you, these things were not human—merely machines for turning food into shit, as the saying goes. What can I do for you, my dears?”

Aloê said, “I wanted to urge you to swear a self-binding oath so that you could be released from this hellhole.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, my dear,” said the smiling, blood-stained old man. “Before either of you were born, I had a counterspell against binding spells engraved on my collarbone. That prevents me from swearing a self-binding oath; you can ask Lernaion about it, if you like.”

“Ur. Well, maybe we can find more acceptable quarters for you.”

“These quarters are perfectly acceptable to me. I’m not particular about things. Perhaps you’re thinking about the nightmares from the decaying fungus, but really I don’t mind them. If you ever get to be my age, which I do not wholeheartedly recommend, you’ll understand how pleasant it is to have a vivid dream, even a nightmare, awake or asleep.”

“If some of the upper floors are intact, I’m sure you can have your nightmares and cleaner air to go with them. We must have you alive to testify, Bleys.”

“I’ll drink to that, as your husband might say, my dear. Yes, I can’t wait to testify. The sooner young Illion is done with healing the Witness Stone, the better I’ll like it. Shouldn’t you be helping him, Noreê, instead of playing chief jailor to an old man?”

“I intend to,” Noreê said quietly.

“Wonderful.”

“You could tell us something of what you have to say now,” Aloê observed.

“But would you believe it? Should you believe it? I would not recommend it, if I were some third person with your best interests at heart (as I am not, of course). No, you will have to wait. Because it’s very important that you believe what I have to say.” Bleys absentmindedly wiped his hands on his white mantle of office. “I wonder what’s for supper?” he said wistfully. “Could one of you ask about it for me on your way out?”

Bleys got his wish a pair of months later. They were very long months from Aloê’s point of view. Most of the vocates started recruiting personal forces of thains, and many had companies of them marching through the streets.

Aloê and Jordel watched them pass by one day from the second floor of his house.

“I suppose they all have to swing their feet at the same time,” Jordel said, “if they’re going to walk so close with everybody’s elbow up everybody else’s ass. But I tell you, Aloê. . . .”

“Tell me, J.”

“I think that they’re doing it to threaten people.”

“I think they’re doing it because they’re afraid.”

“I think that we’re saying the same thing.”

Fear was in the eyes of the thains marching, and fear was in the eyes of the Guarded, watching from the windows in their houses and towers, and fear was in the eyes of the vocates marching at the head of their companies on the long-awaited day of Station.

Since Lernaion, the Summoner of the City, had been charged with Impairment of the Guard, it fell to the vocates to summon themselves to Station. But when Illion gave word that the Witness Stone was healed, Noreê sent her thains as messengers to summon the members of the Graith. Whether they loved Noreê or hated her, the vocates obeyed. Many whispered to each other that she would be chosen as the new summoner, to fill the place left vacant by Earno’s murder.

On the chilly summer day of the Station, Aloê rose before dawn. She was staying with Jordel again because the empty ancientness of Tower Ambrose distressed her. They walked together, without a single thain-attendant, to the Chamber of the Graith. They met Illion, also walking without a thain, and Styrth Anvri, Sundra, Callion, and Keluaê Hendaij, who contented themselves with a single thain-attendant each.

But the streets adjoining the Dome were a solid mass of gray capes and clashing badges. Aloê was idly considering the possibility of making her way through the crowd on stilts when Jordel began to shout, in a shocking stentorian roar, “Make way for the Graith’s vengeancer! Make way!”

The thains-come-lately looked over their shoulders aghast and pressed back against those nearest them. Cracks opened up in the wall of gray capes, and the vocates plunged into them. Jordel continued his shouting, and soon they could hear his brother Baran doing the same in another part of the crowd, and Illion began shouting it, too, and no one in recorded history had ever heard Illion shout anything, and eventually they were on the other side of the crowd, climbing the stairs into the Chamber.

A few vocates were standing before the open double doors to the Chamber proper: Rild of Eastwall, resplendent in purple leggings; Gnython the Rememberer, wearing a green armband on both arms; Kothala of Sandport, sporting a red cap, and a few others.

“Fine ladies and gentlemen,” Jordel rasped (his voice still ragged from shouting), “perhaps you could tell your underlings not to block the streets. There’s more than one way to impair the Guard,” he added.

That spurred them to action; it takes fear to motivate the frightened, Aloê thought. They rushed away to give orders to their disorderly followers.

The pale sun had climbed more than half way up the cool blue sky before the vocates were assembled at Station, and the Guardians accused of Impairing the Guard stood, with folded hands, awaiting the Graith’s judgment. Aloê was obscurely pleased that Naevros had rallied for the occasion. If his clothes were not new, they looked it. His wounded hand looked almost healthy, except for the angry red line where it had been reattached to his arm. He held himself like a person who mattered. But he did not wear the red cloak of his office, and neither did Bavro wear his gray cape.

Lernaion did wear his white mantle of office, however, and Bleys presumably did, too, but it was hard to tell whether the oldest Guardian’s cloak was actually white. His clothes were filthy; his person was filthy; Aloê could smell him from where she stood at the Long Table, halfway across the great Chamber of the Graith. If he was at all embarrassed by his condition, he didn’t show it.

Since the Summoner of the City was among the accused, Noreê stood forward to convene the Station. No one objected to this—at least not out loud. But Aloê could not have been the only vocate who thought their peer was taking too much on herself.

“Vocates,” she said, actually rapping the Long Table with the silver staff of exile, “stand to order! We are come here to settle the fates of our members, accused of Impairment of the Guard and murder of the Guarded. I called you here because the Summoner of the City is among the accused and may not speak here, except in his own defense. If you prefer that someone else preside here, I will stand back.”

Silence.

“Go ahead, Noreê,” suggested Gyrla.

“Thank you, Guardians,” Noreê said. “I call on our vengeancer, Aloê Oaij.”

All faces in the room turned to Aloê. She’d thought much about this moment. It was a chance to wax rhetorical, to magnify herself in the minds of those who are impressed by torrents of well-chosen words. The last trial for Impairment had happened around the time she was being born, but she had read about that case and many others.

In the end, she eschewed any attempt to soothe or startle her listeners with rhetoric. She stated plainly what the conspirators had done and how she had discovered it. She concluded by saying, “The only witness I see who is not present is Ulvana, late of the Order of Arbiters. She was under guard at the High Arbitrate; perhaps she could be sent for.”

“That won’t be possible, I’m afraid,” Noreê said. “I received word from the High Arbitrate last night that Ulvana had committed suicide.”

Aloê felt a sudden stab of grief and pain at this. She was also angry: that the message had come to Noreê and not her; that Noreê had not bothered to tell her until now. The pale cold Guardian loomed over them all these days, sole ruler of the Wardlands. It would have to be stopped somehow.

“Did she jump or was she pushed?” Aloê snapped back.

“If I understand you, Vocate Aloê, you are suggesting that the High Arbitrate may have killed Ulvana in secret to prevent her testimony today.”

“It seems possible, at least.”

“It seems irrelevant, at best. Unless her testimony is key to your case.”

“No. I have stated my case. It is time for the witnesses to ascend to the Witness Stone.”

“May I speak?” Naevros called up from the floor.

“You may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone,” Noreê said.

“That’s just it. I don’t intend to present a defense. Neither does my junior colleague. We will accept death or exile at the Graith’s choosing, or your vengeancer’s alone.”

“Hm.” Noreê allowed herself a cold smile and turned to Aloê. “What do you say, Vengeancer?”

“I’ll abide by the Graith’s decision, or exercise the prerogative if we can’t come to an agreement. But I think the accused should stand together in punishment; they are all equally guilty.”

“We can save part of a day if the summoners also waive their defense,” Noreê said, without much sign of hope. “Lernaion, what say you? Do you admit your guilt?”

“I defer to the judgement of my elder peer,” said Lernaion.

“Bleys: will you admit your guilt?”

This was the moment that horrible old man had waited for. He did not speak at first, but pretended to consider. Then he lifted his head high and cried out, “Waive my defense? I might do so for the good the Graith and the Guard, to which I have devoted the entirety of my very long life. But I will not waive, for the convenience of you, my fellow Guardians, or for the well-being of anyone in the world, my defense of the Wardlands. Everything, everything that the dedicated young vengeancer has told you is true. And it is not all. I have many secret deeds of blood and fear to my credit. I have killed—extorted—threatened—seduced—corrupted—stolen. These are crimes, if you please, if we stood in one of the courts of the unguarded lands. But we do not. All that I have done, all that I have ever done, was done to maintain the Guard.”

“Summoner Earno,” said Noreê coldly, “you may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone—”

“Is that a threat?” shouted the red-faced old summoner. “I tell you, young Noreê, that I have come here expressly to testify on the Stone! I will speak, not in my defense, but in the defense of the Wardlands and in defense of my colleagues too shamed and bemused to speak for themselves. I have suffered; I have been beaten; I have endured night and day the torments of nightmares in that hellhole you consigned me to; I have kept the thin, fragile thread of life unbroken in my ancient body for this, and this alone: to speak and be heard where I could not be silenced! Lead me to your Witness Stone and let the Graith read the truths written in my heart!”

His voice broke on the last word. Aloê, glancing around the Long Table, saw that many of her peers were visibly moved at Bleys’ performance. That was the first time she suspected that the murderers of Earno would escape exile.

“The Stone is in its usual place,” Illion pointed out mildly. There were a few laughs at this, but most of the vocates still seemed taken with Bleys’ dramatic performance. He strode over to the dais of the Witness Stone and laboriously climbed the steps to reach it.

“You will wait for us to establish rapport with the Stone first, Summoner Bleys,” Noreê called down the Long Table.

“Take your time,” replied the great seer calmly.

Illion was standing next to the Stone: he placed a hand on it, and his eyes began to glow with rapture. He held out his other hand to Baran, who stood by him. Baran took the hand and closed his eyes. In time, he too showed the signs of visionary ascent.

It did take time, but one by one the vocates, of varying levels of skill, joined the rapport with the Stone. The only exception was Gyrla, who jumped down contemptuously without saying a word.

They were one, in the end, though all were different, and Noreê spoke in them and through them, saying, “Put your hands on the Stone, Bleys, and accept rapport.”

Bleys smiled—they felt rather than saw it—and placed one finger on the stone. Rapport was instantaneous; he was already in the visionary state.

Bleys said with his mouth, “I am innocent of Impairing the Guard. All I have done, all I have enlisted others to do, I have done to defend the Wardlands.”

They heard the words only vaguely with their ears. They knew them for truth in their hearts.

All stood separate in their shared mind for meditation then. Aloê had time to think: What he believes is true is different from what we may know to be true. He may have Impaired the Guard without intent. But she also knew that most of her case against him was already undone, irrelevant in the face of his shocking admission.

“Why did you murder Summoner Earno?” she finally found the strength to ask.

The great seer turned his attention toward her, and it seemed that she was alone with him.

“I have been waiting for someone to ask me that, my dear. Thank you. Once when I was walking the long roads in the empty lands east of the Sea of Stones, I met an odd entity, a sort of unbeing. . . .”

Aloê later learned that others had asked the same question, or a similar one, and that all the vocates had been drawn into Bleys’ meditation as if each alone was in rapport with him.

It seemed to her that she could see with his eyes, that she ached with his feet, grew short of breath and chill as shadows rose from the dusty earth of the empty lands. She knew somehow that it had been many years ago—shortly after the death of the Two Powers in Tychar.

The unbeing came upon Bleys as he was making a fire to warm himself. He sensed it with his insight. It tried to kill him with a weapon that had no name—but she recognized it. It was a kind of mist that came from nowhere and everywhere. It began to break down Bleys into his component selves, as acid breaks down a piece of meat.

But Bleys was not a piece of meat. He stepped outside of his body into vision and let his body dissolve and reform itself in the presence of the deadly fog, unconcerned with its fleshly agony.

In vision, Bleys saw-without-seeing the unbeing who attacked him.

He wove a path of vision around it in fifteen dimensions so that the unbeing was bewildered and could not dispel his mind as it was trying to dispel his body.

For a timeless time he meditated on the unbeing and its nature. Then he struck back, causing a little fog to condense in the locus where the unbeing presented itself.

The presence of physical matter distressed and excited the unbeing very much.

Bleys realized that the unbeing was the same type of entity that Aloê and Ambrosia had encountered in those same lands. (There was a side corridor of memory in Bleys’ meditation where Aloê saw herself as he saw her, and the cool, ironic lechery of his regard made her feel greasy.)

They duelled that way for a long time with weapons of being and unbeing, of making and unmaking. But eventually their duel became a kind of conversation, where actions bore symbolic meaning.

Bleys learned that the unbeing was only one element in a class of unbeings beyond the northern edge of the world. They had once been in it, but the advent of sun and of material life had driven them out in repugnance and hatred for the new-made world. The Two Powers had been fashioned as an experiment in destroying material life, but had failed because the unbeing sent to keep them in balance had succumbed to materiality.

Bleys revealed that he was a member of a class of beings, some of which had defeated the Two Powers.

The unbeing reiterated its urgent need, shared by all of its cohort, to wipe the slate of the world clean of physical life. Because it had no thought that information should be withheld, it shared various scenarios of world-cleansing.

Bleys was curious about the domain of the unbeings in the far north. Apparently it was a fragment of this world that they had managed to sever free, redrawing the borders of the sky so that it would not be tainted with light and life. So it persisted, a fragment of a world drifting alongside its former home in the Sea of Worlds.

A thought came to Bleys that shocked even him. But he tested it over and over, and there was no flaw that he could see.

He asked the unbeing if it could teach him the skills to redraw the border of the sky and separate a part of the world into its own world.

The unbeing knew part of that knowledge and shared that with him, but the knowledge was too great for any single element of the unbeings to contain its entirety.

Bleys told the unbeing that if he and his fellow beings could know those skills, they would no longer resist, would even assist the project of the unbeings.

That was when the great collaboration began. Bleys and the unbeing fashioned an un-object of many dimensions. With it, he could communicate with the unbeing wherever he was, wherever it was.

Aloê never found the words to explain the un-object to anyone else, but she didn’t need it explained to her: it hung in lightless luminescence at the center of her own mind.

With shock, Aloê realized that Bleys had incorporated the un-object into the Witness Stone itself. Even now, even now. . . .

As she let her awareness expand she became aware of many listeners, the class of unbeings in the far north beyond the wide world’s end, the Sunkillers.

And over the years Bleys, with increasing single-mindedness, pursued his collaboration with the unbeings. His plan was simple: the ultimate protection for the Wardlands was to remove the adjoining lands from existence entirely. Then the Wardlands could persist as an island in the Sea of Worlds, perhaps with an artificial sun and other conveniences, and the Sunkillers could have the rest of their world to themselves.

Of course that meant that everyone and everything in the world that lived and felt and was a being would die. That was what had shocked Bleys about his own plan . . . at first.

But only at first. He was not a purveyor of justice or an avatar of mercy. He did not judge; he defended, and this was the ultimate defense, a final solution to the problem of the unguarded lands.

He enlisted others in his project: Lernaion, who took a long time to convince. Lernaion took upon himself the task of enlisting Earno, but he had bungled it somehow. Aloê sensed Bleys’ rage more clearly than the details of the failure. But probably Earno was hopeless anyway. He had travelled too much in the world to sacrifice it willingly. He seemed to think he had some obligation to it, or to the people in it, that rivalled his obligation to the Guarded.

Lernaion and Bleys enlisted Naevros to do their knifework. Bleys had long ago noted Naevros’ susceptibility, and the whirlwind of thoughts surrounding the vocate’s seduction were tinged with cold pleasure in Bleys’ mind.

Now the unbeings, the Sunkillers, were concerned. They knew from their allies in the Wardlands that beings had been sent to investigate the sun’s death and that some of them were those who had destroyed the Two Powers. The unbeings did not understand and would not understand independent agency and free will. They looked on the actions of the beings approaching them as a betrayal by their allies. The unbeings would be angry, extremely resentful, if those others were not stopped somehow.

To save the Wardlands they must recall their colleagues from the edge of the world and make plans for life after the death of the sun.

Aloê felt the insidious, inevitable pull of the logic. It vibrated in her mind—in the pattern of the un-object that was party to and basis of their rapport. Aloê resisted it, rejected it. Suddenly she became aware of others doing the same. She fought harder, fought free, was alone in her own mind at last, not subject to rapport.

She descended from the visionary state.

As soon as she had pulled the world of matter and energy around her like a blanket, she shouted at Bleys: “Bleys! Break the rapport and let the vocates go or I’ll smash your Stone for you again!”

“If you like, my dear,” said Bleys warmly, and the light in his eyes died. His smile, however, lived on. The vocates, as they returned to full awareness, began to shout and question and argue, and that went on for hours. But Bleys had already won: he knew it, and Aloê did, too. The vocates were frightened, and the way to drive frightened people was with more fear.