Текст книги "The Wide World's End"

Автор книги: James Enge

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Before she could say, even to herself, Don’t do that, you idiots! the two red-cloaked figures leapt into the thick of the retreating Khnauronts and began cutting a swathe through their midst. When the dwarves saw this, they finally began to chant, “Ath, Rokhleni! Ath, Ambrosius! Ath, Naevros! Ath! Ath!” Their line bent into a wedge, and the sharp end drove deep into the Khnauronts.

“Ambrose! Ambrose! The bond of blood!” called out the Gray Folk in fell voices as they dropped down on the Khnauronts like an avalanche from the hills.

The Khnauronts were in full retreat. The descent of the Gray Folk had closed off the retreat to the south. They turned toward the slopes of the Hill of Storms.

“Now!” called Rynyrth, lifting her own bow to the ready. “Sort friend from foe and strike for your blood, harven or ruthen!”

The songbows sang; the gravebolts flew, bright with moonlight against the dark ground; ragged ranks of skeletal Khnauronts went down in the cold light of the dwarvish banners. Aloê saw with disgust that the Khnauronts did indeed use their wands on each other, “eating their own wounded,” as Rynyrth had put it. Every time she saw a Khnauront do that, she aimed a gravebolt at him. Let the eaters be eaten.

Morlock and Naevros’ wild whirling course had carried them through the mob of Khnauronts, and they turned again to strike into the heart of the fragmenting mob.

Now the ragged wave of Khnauronts was climbing the slope of Tunglskin. The gravebolts thinned their ranks, but the survivors fed on the tal of the fallen. The enemies were close enough that Aloê could actually see their black wounds closing like mouths. Their faces were full of ecstasy rather than fear or hate.

When there were only a few paces between the foremost of the enemy and the line woven of dwarves and Guardians, Aloê gripped her bow with her right hand just below its runic rose, wielding it like a club; she drew her knife with her left. Then she leaped out of the line and tore into the Khnauronts, smashing their wands with the weight of her bow, stabbing and parrying with the long knife.

Rynyrth followed her, shouting, “Ath, Rokhlan! Khai, Oaij! Ath! Ath!”

Glancing about to be ware of friend and foe, Aloê saw that Rynyrth was also wielding her bow like a club. For a stabbing weapon, she carried a forked spear of the kind the Khnauronts used.

Lernaion’s bitter, dark eyes were lit with rapture. He stood wavering, like a man about to fall asleep on his feet. But any Khnauront that approached him fell lifeless to the ground.

Earno had seized a fallen Khnauront by the heels and was swinging him in a circle, striking down his enemies with his enemy.

There were moments of wild chaos as all the lines of battle met and mixed on the dark slopes of Tunglskin.

Then the surviving Khnauronts were throwing down their weapons and speaking or weeping with dry, birdlike clicks. They didn’t seem to be surrendering so much as despairing. These had no lifetaker wands. The Khnauronts with wands fought to the death, or until their wands were broken.

Now the battle had ended, but the chaos continued to swirl in Aloê’s mind and heart. She was wounded, she saw: twice in the left side, once in the left arm. She had lost her knife somewhere. She felt frail and crunchy, like a dry cicada husk.

Moonslit moments, separated by moonless dark. She saw Rynyrth and a band of weidhkyrren forcing the defeated Khnauronts to kneel. She saw Deor, his dark eyes fierce, his face unwontedly grim. He didn’t seem to see her, and somehow she could not speak to him.

She heard someone speaking, almost whispering, nearby her. “They will make that crooked man king someday. At least in the North.”

She turned toward the voice. It was Lernaion’s, and he wasn’t speaking to her. He was speaking in Earno’s ear, a dozen paces away, but somehow she could hear it, as if this were a dream. And she heard Summoner Earno’s curt response as clearly: “Shut your lying mouth.”

She looked around for Thea. There were Guardians gathering by the two summoners, but she was not among them. She saw the Gray Folk and the Dwarves mingling on the lower slope, talking in their harsh language—like rocks breaking, she often thought. She saw Morlock and Naevros at the bottom of the slope, leaning on each other in their weariness. She would have gone to them if she had the strength, but which one should she go to? Thea would know. She would at least have an opinion.

Aloê looked over her shoulder. At last she saw her friend, where she had fallen in the line, a pale shriveled form on the dark summit of the star-crowned hill.

There must have been other things, but she never remembered them later, and I will not tell them now.

PART TWO

Rites of Spring

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”

–Tennyson, “Maud”

CHAPTER ONE

What Really Happened

The price of victory is work. The defeated need only flee or die, but those who win the battle must tend the battlefield like a bloody garden, and even take care of their late enemies, living or dead.

The price of fighting a war at all is forgetfulness. In the thick of fighting, few if any have the leisure to ask how it started or why.

In her time, Noreê had fought with sword and knife and naked fist to maintain the Guard. She would do so again. But, as she and her thains-attendant rewove the maze in the Gap of Lone, she had leisure to think of many things.

One was how to make a stronger defense of the Maze. This was mostly a matter of geometry, redrawing the shifting lines of talic force in the Maze so that they tended to reinforce each other rather than work against each other. She developed the necessary pattern in part of an afternoon and taught it to her assistants that evening.

The rest of the time she thought about this strange enemy. Had the Khnauronts, those mindless cannibals, the Strength and the Sight to shatter the Wardlands’ immemorial protections? It seemed unlikely.

Were the Khnauronts merely shock troops, sent to pave the way for a more formidable strike force? That was Noreê’s secret fear, and to forestall it she drove herself and her attendant-thains night and day to refashion the Wards over and above the Gap of Lone.

But as days passed, and the Maze was remade, and no new enemy came, Noreê was compelled to entertain another hypothesis.

The attack of the Khnauronts was a distraction. Something else, someone else, had entered the Wardlands while the Maze was broken down.

She left her thains-attendant to complete the new Maze by themselves. They were delighted by the trust she showed in them, and even more, she realized, by the prospect of her absence. Unlike Jordel, she was not the type of vocate who drew the affection and loyalty of younger Guardians—and, in fact, she rather despised the type.

She walked at random east and south as her mood took her. As she walked, she let her mind drift away from her body in light rapture. She looked for nothing. She watched everything.

The snows of winter were slowly receding, but the greens of spring had not yet appeared. It was oddly like a warm stretch of days in late autumn. Perhaps in this year would come the last of all autumns. She could feel the weight of the death in the world, the hunger of many who would never eat again. It spoke in the silence of her dreams, whether she waked or slept.

She walked much, ate little, and dreamed all the time. Her course, if plotted on a map, would have looked aimless, but it had an aim in view.

Her thinking was this: Whatever or whoever had entered the Wardlands secretly had come too long ago for conventional methods of trailing. But they had come here for some purpose. The nearer they got to their purpose, the more of a shadow it would cast in the future. That talic shadow would fall, with increasing clarity, on the present. All her unlooking was to look for that. All her indifference was to highlight that difference.

Not many seers could feel the cold drift of talic change rebounding from a future event that might never in fact happen. But she was one, and she was here; the task was hers to do. She never shrank from such tasks, however repugnant they were.

So she walked and dreamed and slept and dreamed and sat and dreamed and waited.

The answer came straight to her one morning as she sat in meditation beneath a leafless maple tree. She looked up to see a man standing awkwardly in front of her. He wore a flat black cap to cover his baldness, and from the way he hid his right hand behind him she suspected he had murdered a close relative, possibly his father. He spoke hesitantly, “I’m sorry to interrupt your thought, Vocate.”

“You haven’t.” She felt the chill breeze of the future in this sweaty, fidgety man.

“But you are the Vocate Noreê?”

“I am.”

“There is—I don’t want you to think I’m a mere informer. I don’t expect to be paid, or anything.”

“Be sure that I will not pay you. I rarely touch money. I have none with me now.”

“Oh.” The man stood still, the fidget struck out of him at the thought of someone with no money.

“You were going to say?” she reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah. There’s. In the town there’s a stranger, and I don’t think he’s one of the Guarded. He hardly speaks Wardic.”

The future-chill in her mind transferred itself to this stranger. “What is his name? Can you describe him?”

“He says his name is Kelat, but I think he’s hiding something. He doesn’t even seem to know where he’s from.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He is taller than I am—skin paler than mine, or most people’s—hair yellowish. He is staying at Big Rock House.”

“At the southern edge of town,” she predicted. That was what her insight told her, and the man said, “Yes.”

“Thank you,” she said and stood, ignoring his belated offer of a hand up. She walked away.

“And you have no money at all?” the man said plaintively.

“Is that why you killed—for money?” Noreê said to shut him up. And it worked: she never heard him speak again.

Insight, as Noreê knew better than most, arises from the interplay between the mind and the world of talic impressions below the level of consciousness. It was dangerous to be guided by it because it arose from the unconscious without the benefit of reason. So do actions of prejudice, of madness, of folly. To walk in the way of insight was to risk slavery to these kinds of blindness. It was one of the risks she often took for the Guarded, and she knew that they often had to suffer from her mistakes—her prejudice, madness, folly.

But not today. The wind from the future grew colder and clearer with every step she took. She spent a few minutes in un-meditation to bind her awareness more closely to the chaos of matter and energy that most people thought of (wrongly) as reality.

As she walked into Big Rock House she saw a blond man, of average height or a little taller, paying his score.

“Your name is Kelat?” she asked.

He turned to look at her. His brown eyes were vacant, like a dreamer’s. His leather jacket was stitched together from the skin of garbucks from the plains north of the Dolich Kund. It was probably older than he was. The laces in his boots were woven from shent, probably harvested from the coast of the Sea of Stones. He was almost certainly a Vraidish barbarian, one of the horde that was gradually conquering the fragments of the old Empire of Ontil.

“I think so,” he said. “Sometimes I think I had another name. Or will have.”

The bald man behind the counter met Noreê’s eye and wiggled his ears. Around here that was like saying, Crazy . . . but what can you do?

What Noreê could and did do was hit Kelat on the left temple; then, while he was stunned, she took hold of his neck and stopped blood flow until he passed out.

When Kelat was sprawled on the beery floor of Big Rock House she said to the old man, “This Kelat is an invader. His intent here is unknown. I need to take him to A Thousand Towers so that the Graith can question him on the Witness Stone.”

“You’ll want to talk to the Arbiter of the Peace, then,” the old man said. “She can lend you a cart and horses, maybe a couple of boys to keep Kelat in line.”

“Will you go fetch her?”

“I don’t want to leave my cashbox.”

“Which house is hers, then? I’ll go myself.”

“Aren’t you the one they call Noreê?”

“They do call me that.”

“I guess my money’s safe with you. And I guess you’re welcome to as much of it as you want. You and your sister cured my grandson of a madness once. That was before you were in the Graith—when you were still among the Skein of Healing at New Moorhope.”

“Ah.” Those had been simpler days. She missed them sometimes. But she did not choose to end up like her sister, who had opened up so many doors in her mind that eventually there wasn’t much of a mind left. “I’m sorry; I don’t remember your name.”

“I think you never knew it, Vocate. It is Parell.”

“Parell.”

The old man flipped part of the counter back, bowed low before her, and strode off to fetch the Arbiter.

The Arbiter was a young woman, less than two centuries old, with improbably orange hair and black eyebrows. Noreê knew much about people and what they thought, but she did not understand why people dyed their hair. Both the attendants that the Arbiter brought with her had dyed hair as well, so maybe it had something to do with the local chapter of the Arbitrate.

They came riding in a donkey-drawn cart, and as soon as introductions were made all around, the attendants bound Kelat’s sleeping form and loaded it into the cart.

“Do you want a force to accompany you?” the Arbiter asked, as Noreê climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Only if you want someone to drive the cart back to you,” Noreê said.

“That’s not needful. Just return it to one of the Arbiters in A Thousand Towers. Or keep it, if it’s any use to you.”

Noreê nodded and was about to depart when she remembered something. “Arbiter, that man who told me of Kelat. . . .”

“Bakell. I know him.”

“I think he’s a murderer.”

“I think so, too. He probably killed his father, but we can’t prove it. He may have buried the corpse in his house, where we can’t get at it. What can you do?”

“You could buy the house. Or someone else might do it on your behalf, to allay suspicion. He seems like someone who would do almost anything for money.”

“Possibly, but then he’d just move the body and any other evidence out of the house before the sale was complete . . .”

Noreê waited for the Arbiter to complete the thought.

“. . . and then we could catch him at it!”

“It seems likely,” Noreê agreed.

“Thanks, Guardian. Ever think of joining the Arbiters?”

“Often. Goodbye.”

She had a bad feeling about the Arbiter—something would go wrong with her, or to her, in the near future. Noreê didn’t choose to know about it. She spoke to the donkey and it started up the town’s single street. Another word led the donkey to turn up a track leading to the Road.

Money she did not need and could not use. It was others who paid—sometimes with their lives—when she met them. She was sorry for it, sometimes. But she did not do these things for herself; it was for the Guarded. So she told herself, not always quite believing it, as the donkey pulled the cart onto the Road and headed south, toward A Thousand Towers.

Before she reached the city, a passing thain told her the terrible and wonderful news from up north. The Khnauronts were defeated, Thea was dead, and they spoke of Morlock Ambrosius like a king. Like a king.

Thinking of a day in Tower Ambrose more than four generations ago now, the day Morlock Ambrosius had been born, she told herself, “I did what I could.” She knew that was true. And she added, “I will do what I must.” And that was true as well.

CHAPTER TWO

Blood’s Price

Grief is love. That’s the deadly thing about it. You cannot live with grief chewing away at your insides like a cancer. The pain is too great. No one can stand it. But to kill the grief, you would have to kill your love for the one you lost. That is a survival too much like death: to be alive, without love, without caring. Even if you could do it, you would not.

It was fortunate, in a way, that Aloê had been wounded, and that some carnivorous Khnauront had fed from afar on her life. (That was what they told her had happened.) She hardly had the strength to live or grieve. She felt them, grief and the longing to live, felt them struggling within her, shadows fighting in the sandy emptiness of her heart, and it was all she could really feel. But she didn’t even feel that much. Her life was ebbing and she was grateful, in a dry, gray way.

Morlock was often there. She sometimes saw Naevros, too, and Deor, and Rynyrth. Once she asked one of them, she could not remember which, where Thea was, and while they hesitated, she remembered and turned her face to the wall.

And once she heard Morlock saying, “My life is hers. Take it all, if there is need.”

And Deor was there, too, with his broad face made for laughing, but he wasn’t laughing now as he said, “And mine. Blood has no price!”

“I won’t be a part of this!” said a third person angrily. Aloê didn’t know her. She was wearing the saffron robes of an initiate to the Skein of Healing, though. They were usually smiling, as if they knew some secret that you didn’t, but this woman was not smiling. The secret in her mind had turned unpleasant.

“Get out, then,” Rynyrth said impatiently. “We don’t need you here.”

“I cannot permit—”

“Lady, you stand on the western slopes of Thrymhaiam and I am the daughter of Oldfather Tyr syr Theorn. You do not permit me or deny me here. Go!”

The lady in yellow left and Rynyrth turned to Morlock. “Do you think it will work?” she asked him in Dwarvish.

As dry and empty as Aloê felt, she nearly laughed at that. If Morlock had made it, it would work. Whatever it was.

Morlock said, “Unclear. The pattern has been renewed, and seems to be effective. But the trigger for the spell is the desire for life. If she has lost that. . . .”

“We must try.”

“Yes.”

“Who . . . ?”

“Who do you think?” Morlock asked impatiently. “Who will die if she doesn’t live? I know you two love her also. But it’s not the same.”

“Then!”

Aloê felt two pairs of hard, blunt, dwarvish hands lift her out of bed. As she stood, waveringly, on her own feet—not sure she wanted to stand, not willing to say she was unwilling—someone put something into her hand.

She looked at it uncomprehendingly. If Morlock had made this, it was not up to his usual standards. A spiderweb of silvery seams covered its surface, as if it had been shattered and repaired. It was a wand, about the length of her forearm, but not as heavy as it should have been. The end pointed away from her had a sort of clawed mouth. . . .

It was one of the lifetaking wands.

She looked up to see Morlock standing in front of her. He had a knife if his hand. When her eyes met his, he slashed his bare forearm with the knife and fiery blood sprang forth.

The two shadows struggling within her struggled no longer. Finally, they agreed on something. She learned then that grief is not only love; it is also hate—hate for whatever lives when the loved one is dead. The longing to live and the longing to punish everything alive had found something to agree on.

The lifetaking wand sang in her hand and she knew the evil ecstasy of stealing someone else’s life.

She cried out, in delight and horror, and Morlock fell to the ground in a shower of burning blood.

As she came wholly alive she realized what she was doing and she threw the wand from her as hard as she could.

She ran to Morlock where he had fallen and knelt beside him. He was breathing at least, but his eyes were clenched shut and his breathing was broken by croaking sounds, as if he were choking on phlegm.

She ripped a piece of cloth off his shirt and carefully bound up the gaping wound in his arm. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to tend to his injuries, so she managed to do it without burning herself. She put her hand on his face and waited for him to stop choking.

His breathing grew more even. His eyes opened and looked into hers.

“That was stupid,” she said.

He coughed once, twice, and sat up. “Worked,” he said.

“You could have died.”

He looked at her with those luminous gray eyes and said nothing.

“Sorry to interrupt this tender moment,” Deor said gruffly, holding out his cape, “but this is fireproof. And you’re dripping fire all over the place. And we are surrounded by pine trees.”

Morlock smiled with half his face and took the cape, wrapping it around his wounded arm.

“So,” she said, remembering words that had come to her through the gray fog of despair and grief, “you brought me to Thrymhaiam?”

“Yes,” said Morlock. “Our harven-kin insisted. In fact—”

He stood. She looked up at him astonished as he reached down and picked her up. He carried her in his unwounded arm out the door of the little hut and into the thin golden light of the ailing sun.

They stood on a steep slope on the western side of Thrymhaiam. The valley below was full of folk—mandrakes, dwarves, men and women, all waiting there, waiting for something.

Morlock lifted Aloê up and held her triumphantly over his head in the thin sunshine. “Put me down, you champion idiot!” she shouted.

The crowds below roared. It was like a storm at sea; it went on and on; there was no stopping it.

Aloê was amazed. Why did it mean so much to them? Was she, as a person, so important to them? Had she come to stand, in their minds, for all their dead and wounded, and their triumph in her healing was a way to overcome their grief? Was it because she was Morlock’s mate?

She didn’t like that thought. But she remembered a voice saying in the night, They will make that crooked man king someday. At least in the North. And she remembered another voice saying, Shut your lying mouth.

She wanted to agree with the second voice. But she began to fear that the first voice might be right.

The crowds were still cheering when Morlock turned and carried her back into the lodge. He laid her gently down in the hateful bed where she had spent so many empty hours, but it was not so bad now. Thea was still dead and Aloê still grieved for her, but the spring sunlight was pale on the windowsill, reminding her that the world itself was dying. She had work to do, while her own life lasted, however long that was.

She was alive enough to feel hungry and tired, though. A weidhkyrr named Khêtlynn brought her a bowl of broth and a mug of beer from the cooking lodge of the weidhkyrren, and she gratefully accepted them. After Khêtlynn left she napped until the woman in yellow returned to sew up Morlock’s wound. The healer wore odd metal-mesh gloves to do the work. The thin sunlight and flecks of bloody fire glittered on the metal as the healer worked patiently, and Aloê nodded off again.

When she awoke, she found that Morlock was in bed beside her. Horseman was rising, its blank eye staring through the western window of the lodge. In the unforgiving light Morlock looked uglier than ever, and so tired—his eyes like bruises as he snored there. She remembered with wonder what he had done for her, and what he had said about her as she was dying. Now part of her life was his. She felt the honor; she felt also the burden. She kissed him gently on his weary eyes and slipped out of bed.

It was chilly for a spring night, but she wore her red vocate’s cloak, wrapping it close around her. The grass on the slope was winter-dry and sparse, hissing against her shoes. Horseman was not in the sky, but great Chariot stood somber in the east, and little Trumpeter was high in the western sky, still full of light and hope. The major and minor moon gave her plenty of light to pick her way down the slope. She wasn’t sure where she was headed but she had to get out and see something.

There was a camp in the valley below, almost like a town full of lights and people. She drifted toward it.

There was a fire surrounded by fire-eyed Gray Folk at the edge of the camp. They rose and spoke to her politely in their crunchy language, called her harven, and asked her to sit with them. She begged off, saying she wanted to shake her legs a bit. The idiom made their eyes stretch wide and she had the sense they were about to laugh. But they didn’t laugh, and when one of them said, “Our word of respect to your husband, Ruthen Morlock,” they all bowed their serpentine heads and touched their scaly chests. A voice whispered in her ear, They will make that crooked man a king someday. She turned away from them and it, striding deeper into the camp.

She saw Naevros syr Tol coming toward her up the narrow path between shelters, and she wondered what they would say to each other. Had he been among the crowd, cheering with the rest, when Morlock had held her up triumphantly in the sun? Had he been wounded in the battle? Who else that they knew and loved had been killed in the stupid war now ended?

He brushed past her without speaking. That astonished her. She almost turned and spoke to him, but then strode proudly on instead. Perhaps the bond between them was finally broken. Perhaps it was time for that: it was a time of endings.

Suddenly weary, she leaned against a wooden booth. She felt tears on her face, but only an emptiness inside her, frighteningly like the grayness of despair and near-death she had recently escaped.

“What brings you wandering into the night, Rokhlan?” asked a familiar voice.

She opened her eyes to see Deor looking up at her.

“Ath, Rokhlan!” she replied politely. “I needed to walk and breathe some fresh air. I was tired of that house of sickness.”

“I understand that,” Deor said, “but have you overdone it, perhaps.”

“No.” She stood tall and smiled down at him. “No! But . . . something bitter just happened to me.”

He said nothing, but smiled and waited. He was a wordy fellow, but a good listener—a rare combination.

She found herself saying, “I walked past Naevros just now. I think he saw me—he must have seen me. But he didn’t say anything to me.” She halted then, afraid that what she had said might sound disloyal somehow.

He put his hand on her arm and said, “It has been a hard time for everyone. I assure you, Naevros was as worried about you as any of us. But relief from one pain can make us newly conscious of another.”

“I suppose.” She gripped his arm with her free hand and he released her. “And what have you been keeping busy with?” she asked. That he was busy was a given: she had known Deor almost as long as she had Morlock, and she had rarely seen the dwarf at rest.

“We’ve got to herd the surviving Khnauronts down to A Thousand Towers where the Graith can have a look at them and decide whether to expel them or kill them.”

“No doubt.”

“Well, Lernaion and Earno are sitting with their legs crossed, weaving a little version of the Wards for each of the prisoners. Then they are going to stitch them together into a kind of ghostly honeycomb. Then they’ll be more herdable, you see.”

Aloê thought about this plan for a moment, then said, “It must be an enormous undertaking. Surely there are hundreds of survivors from the battle.”

“No longer.”

“Oh.”

“I guess you mean, ‘Why not?’”

“I guess I do.”

“The Khnauronts without their lifetakers are a fragile bunch; there isn’t much that keeps them alive. All the wounded died. We had binders from the Skein of Healing working night and day to no avail.”

“Odd.”

“It’s odder than that, harven. Many of the unwounded folded their hands and died. They looked—that is—”

“Yes?”

“They looked like you looked, until today. Empty. They’d given up. I’m sorry—”

“No, I understand. But some survive.”

“Yes! We made them soup, you see. Some ate it when it was set before them, some didn’t. The ones who ate lived.”

“Perhaps you should have offered the others pie. Not everyone likes soup.”

“Eh! I wasn’t born to run a refectory for ghouls. They can eat soup or starve, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s not the funny thing, Harven Aloê.”

“There’s a funny thing?”

“Well, more of an oddly disgusting thing.”

“That is a little different.”

“Shut up, can’t you? I’m trying to talk here!”

She bowed low, waving her arms in a parody of a courteous flourish.

“I like how you put that,” Deor said. “Anyway, you know how Southers cut up someone to find out how they died?”

Aloê smiled. She had been born on an island off the southern coast of Laent—about as far south as you could go and still be in the Wardlands. “I’ve never actually done it myself, but—”

“God Avenger!” whispered Deor, genuinely dismayed. He put a hand over his mouth, as if to prevent more offensive words from pouring out.

“Harven Deor!” she said patiently. She grabbed his free hand and held it in both of hers.

He slowly lowered his hand from his mouth. “It’s just that I forget sometimes—no, never mind!”

“Never mind it, Deor, truly.”

“What I really meant was, it’s those strange women from New Moorhope who do it, the yellow-robed healers.”

Some of those women were men, but Aloê wasn’t surprised that the difference wasn’t clear to a dwarf. It wasn’t always clear to her, even back when she was studying the arts at New Moorhope. She nodded.

“They opened up some of these dead Khnauronts, you see. Actually, I think they opened them all up. And the ones who died from not eating, well, they couldn’t have gotten any good from food anyway. Their innards or vittles, the parts that are used for nourishment—I don’t know what the Wardic word is—”

“Use the Dwarvish one.”

“Their shykkump.”

Aloê thought she recognized the word—it represented the tract from the gullet to the anus, if she wasn’t mistaken. She nodded.

“All that,” the dwarf continued, “was useless, and much of it was gone, absorbed back into the walls of the body.”

“All right. That is oddly disgusting.”

“Yes. They were dead from the moment they lost their lifetakers. Lernaion thinks that the ones who could still eat were just recent recruits—their shykkumpen would have dried up over time, too. But Earno thinks that it might have been a rank-marker, with the inferior Khnauronts slurping down soup, and the superior ones feeding off their tal.”