The Wide World's End Read online

  He turned away from the fallen Khnauronts, both dead now, and went to Morlock’s side of the hill.

  There is no time in a match with the sword; that was one of the things Naevros loved about fighting. Each moment is an eternity leading to another.

  But the night was darker, significantly darker, than it had been. He guessed his duel against the Khnauronts had taken some time. He was interested to see that Morlock had not killed even one of his opponents yet.

  Naevros usually preferred sex with women, as often as he could get it, but he considered himself a connoisseur of male beauty. As such, he usually had little regard for Morlock, a man without commanding height or any other particular charm in his appearance or manner.

  But what Morlock could make that misshapen body do was indeed remarkable. The strength he could command! The grace with which he could apply it! And there was something about his eyes. . . . Naevros had to admit that Aloê’s choice was not completely ridiculous.

  Naevros watched with impartial interest as the crooked vocate slashed a dark, dripping wound in the sagging, leathery stomach of one of the Khnauronts. It healed visibly . . . but much slower than his enemy’s had. The second Khnauront fed off the first, extending his claw-faced tube toward the healing wound. But the second Khnauront had already been wounded in the eye, Naevros saw, and the first Khnauront was feeding off that. . . .

  Why had Morlock not finished them off? Naevros wondered. Naevros felt a natural pride in his own abilities, but he knew those of his sparring partner equally well; surely Morlock could have finished off at least one of them by now.

  As he watched Morlock watching them, he guessed that . . . that Morlock was curious. Yes, that was it. He was wounding them, watching them, waiting to see what would happen.

  Naevros realized that here, at last, he had a chance to be free of his rival once and for all. He could, for instance, trip Morlock and walk away while the Khnauronts finished him off. No one could blame him: there were always casualties in war. And he would bring a secret that would help defeat the Khnauronts completely. Aloê would grieve, of course, and Naevros would have to wait. But he knew he could wait as long as he had to. This was his chance indeed.

  He didn’t take it. He raised the claw-faced tube in his hand and drained the wounded Khnauronts. The torment and the ecstasy swept over him as before, but it was less distracting. There was a sense of satiation, almost of bloat.

  Did the Khnauronts cultivate their starved, stringy frames to be more receptive to the stolen tal from their victims? Was the constant quest for this ecstasy what had gnawed away at their intelligence—their souls? For the first time, Naevros understood the Khnauronts: what they were, and why they did what they did. It wasn’t the hunger for food. It was the hunger for that: the burst of life that came from someone’s death. And now he knew that hunger himself.

  The Khnauronts fell sprawling, losing grip on their weapons. Morlock advanced cautiously and severed the hands holding their tubes. He impaled the hands each through the wrist with his sword, like chunks of meat on a skewer. Then he carried the skewered hands, still gripping the claw-faced tubes, over to Naevros.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered. His throat was dry; his face was wet; his stance was weary. Naevros felt for him the smug pity that the well-fed rich feel for the hungry poor.

  “What are those?” Naevros said, gesturing at the hands. “Souvenirs?”

  “The wise should see these things and learn from them,” Morlock said. “Noreê, Illion, the seers of New Moorhope.”

  “But you don’t want to touch them.”

  “No. You,” Morlock said, nodding at the tube in Naevros’ hand, “are a braver man than I am.”

  Naevros remembered the cold, gray gaze as Morlock watched the Khnauronts feed on each other while he fought both for his life.

  “You’ll do,” he told his friend and enemy.

  They fled westward then, bearing their trophies and the news that would restore the Guard, at least for a little while.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Hill of Storms

  War was not a business at which the Graith of Guardians excelled. The Guard was supposed to keep enemies outside the borders, and the Wardlands did not indulge in wars of conquest.

  An army needs a command structure, and the Graith was designed to provide nothing of the sort. All the vocates were free agents who could disregard direct orders even from the summoners, and the summoners were coequal in authority and reputation, at least in theory. Thains were bound to follow orders of senior Guardians, but even they were known to disobey. In fact, the most disobedient thains were viewed as having the most potential as vocates.

  The force of Guardians that went north along the Whitewell, in response to the summons of Sharvetr Ûlkhyn, was an army replete with commanders and woefully short on common soldiers. The Summoner Earno was there, with an attendant cloud of thains and vocates. Aloê Oaij and Thea Stabtwice were there, and they had been joined in the jaws of the mountain pass by dry, dark Summoner Lernaion and fifty attendant thains.

  In the end, it was Aloê and Thea who ended up leading the group by the simple expedient of getting up early and walking in the direction they thought most advisable. They listened politely to everyone who gave them advice in the course of the day, but they only conferred with each other.

  That changed one morning on the slopes below Gray Town. The mountain village was completely abandoned—not in a panic, it seemed, and not because of attack from the Khnauronts (as Sharvetr had named them—as good a name as any). The Guardians spent the night indoors there, and the next morning they cautiously descended into Northhold.

  They were negotiating a tricky path down a steep slope, dense with shik-needle trees, when one of the conifers spoke to then: “Rokhleni!”

  Aloê and Thea both halted, and the trail of Guardians behind them did likewise.

  A short stocky shape detached itself from the tree and walked up to them. It was a female dwarf, her dark, plaited hair streaked with gray. She was clad in mottled grayish green; there was a longbow and a quiver slung over her broad shoulders and a long knife in her belt.

  “Harven Rynyrth!” called Aloê. “Well met, Rokhlan!” added Thea.

  “Harven Rokhlanclef Aloê,” said Rynyrth kyr Theorn. They were harven to each other because Rynyrth was the daughter of Oldfather Tyr, and Morlock was his harven son. “And Rokhlan Thea. We are well met indeed, but not by accident. Eldest Vetrtheorn knew that Guardians would be travelling north to fight the Khnauronts, and he told us to meet you. I’m glad the Graith sent you two.”

  “We sent ourselves,” Thea said.

  “Yes, I see that,” Rynyrth replied with a half-smile, glancing up the slope at the trail full of Guardians. “Weidhkyrren!” she called out. “Greet your allies!”

  The needle-thick trees gave birth to a company of short, stocky, militant dryads. Aloê’s guess was that their company had doubled in size.

  The Weidhkyrren from Over Thrymhaiam are the huntresses and farmers of the underground realm. Aloê had come to know a few of them over the years, especially their leader Rynyrth, who she would without question want at her side if it came to a life-or-death fight. Vetr the Eldest of Theorn Clan was a steady, honest fellow. His sister Rynyrth was dangerous.

  “What are your people armed with?” Rynyrth asked. “The latest from my brother Morlock says that distance weapons are best against these beasts.”

  Thea displayed her spear. Aloê shamefacedly presented the knife she had scavenged from the burned-out Raenli homestead, and a club that had, until recently, been a tree branch.

  Rynyrth examined them gravely. “I know you are dangerous with any weapons,” she said. “But my weidhkyrren bring songbows with gravebolts, enough to arm most of you.”

  Aloê dropped her club and sheathed her knife with great relief, accepting the new weapons offered by the dwarves. Thea was more reluctant: she was used to her spear, which was strong enough for stabbing but balanced
for throwing. But there was no denying the greater force of the songbow, so she slung her spear over her shoulder for emergencies and adapted to the needs of the moment.

  The gravebolts were much like ordinary arrows, but the shaft of each one contained an impulse well.

  “The gore,” Rynyrth explained to Thea, tapping the pointed arrowhead, “bears a talic oculus. See that silver ring around the point? You take the bow; you aim the bolt at what you would strike. If the target has a talic presence, the arrow will perceive it. The pattern in the arrowhead freezes at the moment of release from the bow. The bolt will travel straight from the release to the target. Don’t count on a rise and fall, as you would with a normal arrow.”

  Rynyrth drew a gravebolt from her own quiver. She showed a mark on the shaft to the Guardians: it looked a bit like a pine tree with the branches missing on one side. “Note the rune. Your gravebolts will fly at the note of your songbow, no other.” She spun the arrow a few times to fill its impulse well and then fitted the bolt to her bow. She took aim at a nearby tree; she released the arrow and the bow sang it on its way. It struck the tree with splintering force and the tree shed a year’s worth of new needles. Rynyrth retrieved the gravebolt and showed it to Thea and Aloê: it was undamaged. She replaced it in her quiver.

  Thea was impressed. “What is its range?” she asked.

  “It will vary from weidhkyrr to weidhkyrr. We find a gravebolt usually travels three or four times as far as an ordinary bowshot.”

  “And it always hits its target.”

  “There is no always. The target must have a talic imprint, and that imprint must be more or less stable. But usually a shot means a strike.”

  “It’s not very sporting.”

  Rynyrth’s dark eyes crossed with amusement. “Listen, Rokhlan, I don’t know how it is with you. We do not shoot for sport. For sport we sing and dance; we climb trees; we juggle; we do many things. When we shoot, we kill.”

  Aloê almost spoke to interrupt the tension she saw developing between the two females, but Thea laughed and put her hand on Rynyrth’s shoulder and the moment passed. Thea was much like one of the Weidhkyrren, Aloê reflected. She never fought without purpose, and then she fought without quarter.

  From that moment their dual leadership became a triad. In principle, Guardians could not command the Guarded, and in addition Rynyrth was a sensible female who had seen combat before, albeit not since the Year of Fire when dragons invaded the Northhold.

  They paused for part of that day so that the Guardians could acquaint themselves with their new weapons and so that the two groups could acquaint themselves with each other. Rynyrth had news, too, that the senior Guardians needed to discuss. Lernaion and Earno, their resplendent white cloaks somewhat the worse for travel, joined the informal council but listened more than they spoke. There was an art to being a summoner; Noreê called it “leading without command.” Aloê didn’t fully understand it, but she was glad that the males didn’t try to steal the thread of conversation.

  Rynyrth used the butt of her songbow to sketch out a rough map of the gravehills on a patch of soft ground. “Eldest Vetr is sending his bowmen—” She used the Wardic word with a wry inflection “—here, in the northwest. The Gray Folk, all but the children and their caregivers, hold the hills in the south.”

  “Where is everyone else?” asked dry, dark-skinned Lernaion. “We found their town empty.”

  “They are under Thrymhaiam, enjoying the courtesy of their ruthen kin, the Seven Clans.” Again, Rynyrth smiled as she spoke: there was some tension there, Aloê knew, between the dwarves and the mandrakes. Or was it between the male and female dwarves?

  “Word from your fellow vocates, Naevros, and my harven-kin Morlock is that they will rally the Silent Folk beyond Kirach Starn and attack from the west. They say they will drive the Khnauronts before them.”

  “Bold words,” observed Thea dryly.

  “Maybe. That harven-kin of mine is reckless enough to earn a hero’s grave.” She drummed her fingers thrice on the wood of her songbow. “Not in this war, we hope, Oldfather Tyr.”

  Aloê did not disagree with any of this, but there were more urgent matters to discuss. “Then we stand in the east and await the retreat of the Khnauronts?”

  “You stab at the matter’s heart,” Rynyrth said agreeably.

  “Then I recommend we take up station on and around the Hill of Storms,” Aloê said. “It is the tallest of the gravehills—best for watching, best for defense, and it commands the passes to the south, if the Khnauronts try to flee that way.”

  “You speak my thought, harven.”

  “Agreed,” said Thea.

  The summoners said nothing, but turned away to call their junior Guardians back to the march. The red-cloaked vocates among them had as much right as anyone else to participate in the decision just made, but none of them seemed to have been interested. Aloê was often struck at how often the independence of the vocates was merely theoretical. As soon as most Guardians got the right to stand among the Graith at Station and wear the red cloaks of vocates, they sought out one of the summoners to follow, as if they were still thains. It was odd to her . . . but in this case it made for a quicker result.

  They pressed their march and halted at last in twilight on the dark shoulders of the Hill of Storms, or Tunglskin, as the dwarves called it. Thains, vocates, and weidhkyrren sat side by side, drank water or bitter ale from bottles, and munched cold provisions. There was not much talk.

  Aloê, Thea, Rynyrth, and the summoners stood atop the hill, in front of the Broken Altar. Once the first and greatest of the Corain had been imprisoned here, but he had been slain at last and in truth during the Year of Fire by a bewildered young man whom Aloê had later married. She took some comfort from that thought but didn’t speak of it. She spent part of the time going through her quiver and making sure the gravebolts all bore the same mark as her songbow: a tangle of curves with a sharp protrusion or two—something like a rose. There was little chance her harven-kin would have made a mistake and included the wrong gravebolt in her quiver . . . but it is the kind of life-losing chance that sometimes happens in combat. Anyway, there was little else to do.

  As night arose, the three moons opened their eyes: Horseman glowering and red in the west, Chariot perhaps halfway up the vault of the sky, with Trumpeter rising, searingly bright in the west.

  “Khai, gradara,” whispered Rynyrth to the rising moon.

  As if in response, the banefires were kindled on the gravehills—but not on all of them. There was a cloud of darkness in the heart of the burning blue graves.

  “Rokhlan Earno,” Rynyrth said, “why do they kill the dead Corain? We know it is so because the Guardians said it in their message, and because we in Over Thrymhaiam watched the banefires go out, one by one. But we don’t understand. Why kill the dead?”

  “Dead is a relative term,” Lernaion began, but Earno, talking over him, said, “Incidental, I think. The banefires are tal-sinks—they are meant to drain away the tal of the dead Corain. Unfortunately, they learned to master them and use them to drink the tal of living beings nearby. It is the tal implicit in the banefire web that the Khnauronts crave. We think they live on tal as much or more than they live on flesh.”

  Aloê could feel Lernaion’s unspoken anger, Earno’s obvious indifference. There was a cleft between the summoners, that much was clear.

  She turned her insight outward, to the darkness in the gravehills. She saw no smoke in the sky, tasted no distant fire on the cold wind. If the Khnauronts had made camp, it was far away indeed.

  Rynyrth, too, had been looking into the dark gravehills, and now she lay down on the face of the hill and embraced it like a child embracing her mother. Presently she leapt up.

  “Lukharnadh hai, ruthenen!” she cried. “Be ready, too, Guardians of the south! I hear dwarvish boots on these hills. I hear the tramp of many slender feet. The battle is joined and comes toward us!”

  Guardians and dwar
ves alike leapt to their feet. Rynyrth ran up and down their lines, arranging them in ranks of three.

  Aloê reflected that the command of three had shrunk to one. A glance at Thea’s face, rueful in shadows, showed that her comrade was thinking the same thing. But the anarchy of the Wardlands worked because people were willing to let the work be done by the one who could do it best. In this place, in this hour, it was Rynyrth.

  Rynyrth returned to them, saying as she approached, “Each fighter has only so many gravebolts, and the Khnauronts drink life, as Rokhlan Earno has told us. A warrior without bolts, or who has been wounded, must make place in the front for another. The unwounded shall be a wall for the wounded.”

  “Earno told you,” said Lernaion, “yet I think you knew it already.”

  “It was in Harven Morlock’s last message to us.”

  “Hmph. He takes a lot on himself.”

  Aloê didn’t like where this conversation was going. It wasn’t for Guardians to be keeping needful knowledge from the Guarded, but Lernaion seemed to think that Earno and Morlock should have done so. She wondered if Rynyrth would be offended, but the dwarf said only, “He was ours before he was yours. He will be ours again when you are done with him. You will pardon him, I hope.” As she spoke, she unslung her songbow, drew a gravebolt from her quiver, twirled it and set it to the bow. The Guardians, more slowly, with less practiced hands, did likewise.

  They all waited as the stars spun slowly beyond the moons overhead, and the rumbling in the hills grew louder.

  There were lights, now, casting distorted shadows on the steep gray hillsides—real lights, not the deceptive glare of banefire. Aloê could hear the clash of metal on metal but no voices yet.

  Stick-thin figures stumbled into sight, lit indirectly by the approaching lights. Most clutched a wand with a clawed end in one hand and a stabbing weapon in the other; some had only the stabbing weapons. The wandbearers pointed their wands at the wandless, who thrashed about and fell and crawled and were suddenly still.