The Wide World's End (16 page)

“Where did you get those ridiculous beasts?” he asked Morlock.

“Borrowed them from Illion,” said the other quietly.

The horses, Westhold bred and trained, had enough sense to get home. Deor shrugged and decided not to worry about them. He was a little worried about how they would tackle the next stage of the journey, but at least it wouldn't be on horseback.

They soft-footed up the street but turned before they reached the crossroad that would bring them to the front of the lockhouse. They snuck up the street behind it and approached the house from the rear.

It was too much to hope for that the back of the house would be completely unguarded. But, in fact, there were only two thains there, and they were less than attentive. Their spears were standing against the wall of a nearby house, and they sat on the curb playing dice in the pale glow of a coldlight.

“Three crosses,” said the shorter of the two, a woman seemingly. “That's twenty-one to you.” She handed the dice and cup to her watchmate.

He took them and shook them and said, “I don't like this duty.”

“I don't enjoy looking at your face, either.”

“It's nothing to do with that. You said no grudges, Krida.”

“So I did. Are you going to roll, or just make knuckly music all night long?”

“Rolling.” The dice clattered onto the streetstones and grew still. “Night and day. Top that, wench.”

“I topped your mother,” said Thain Krida, accepting the dice cup and dice.

“Who hasn't? Shake ‘em up, Guardian.”

Krida rattled the dice in the cup and threw. “Spider-face. Chaos in shiny nuggets! Go again?”

“Sure. Why not? For another meat pie?”

“I'm tired of buying you meat pies. How about a bowl of red cream?”

“Sure. You go first: loser's privilege. I'll tell you what it is with this duty, Krida.”

Krida, shaking the dice cup, guessed, “No, let me guess. Nightmares from the evil walls? Stink from the prisoners? Guilt from profiting by your watchmate's bad luck?”

“No. It's this: I joined the Graith to keep the Wardlands safe. But now we have a prison. What's next? Tax collecting? Treason trials? We get to genuflect before some self-styled king and laugh at his stupid jokes?”

“Throwing,” said Krida flatly. After the dice skittered to a halt she said, “A snake and a bird. Not so bad.”

“But you're not saying anything, so I guess you think I'm a bung-biter.”

“I do think you're a bung-biter, but that's not why.”

“Answer me straight or keep the dice and play against yourself.”

She handed him the dice and the cup, and she said, “I don't know, Garol. I don't like guarding a prison, either, but no one said it was permanent. Noreê says that a king is what she's trying to prevent—those Ambrosiuses.”

“Doesn't she seem a little crazy to you on the subject?”

“You didn't know Old Ambrosius? I guess not. Listen, if Noreê, who walked against the Dark Seven, is scared of that guy, there's reason for it. He had reason to hate Earno, and now Earno is dead, dropped dead, murdered in the middle of the Wardlands in the sight of three Guardians, and no one knows who did it! That tells you who did it. Old Ambrosius, or maybe the young one.”

“Ah.”

“They say he was there. I don't like all this stuff. Dwarves and mandrakes and God Sustainer knows what else walking around the place like they belonged here. I remember when this was a free country for
people
—just people, not every weird shtutt that wandered over the mountains. It started to get bad when the Northhold came under the Guard. And who was responsible for
that
?”

“The Graith.”

“Who
really
? It was that Old Ambrosius.”

“You weren't even born back then. What do you know about it?”

“I hear things. You would, too, Garol, if you bothered to listen.”

“All I know is, I didn't sign on to be a prison guard.”

Krida groaned. “Shut up and roll.”

Standing in the shadows, Morlock mimed tossing something. Deor would have preferred a clearer clue, but he nodded and gestured at his eyes. Morlock nodded and closed his eyes.

Deor crouched and groped on the ground for a suitable rock. It took him a while to find one, but when he did he tapped Morlock on the elbow to let him know it was almost time to act, and then he threw the rock as hard as he could at the watch-thains' coldlight.

The glass shattered and the light went out. Deor saw the two goggling at each other in the glow of the dispersing lightwater.

Morlock brushed by him, running up the alley in his soft shoes, his eyes still tightly closed. A man's eyes would not adjust as quickly to darkness as Deor's did, but the dwarf thought his
harven
-kin was overdoing the caution a bit. He followed him into the fray.

There was a scramble under the wall of the lockhouse as the guard-thains tried to find their spears in the dark. They hadn't yet thought to call for help, then Morlock and Deor were on them.

Morlock seemed to be throttling Garol, which to Deor's mind was a little extreme. The attack also wasn't really an option for Deor, as Krida was an armlength or so taller than him.

He set his feet and punched her as hard as he could in the stomach. But his aim was a little off and his stone-hard fist fell on her pubic bone. She bent over, gasping for air, and he hit her hard under the chin when it came into reach. She rolled unconscious on the street next to the dice and cup. Morlock lowered Garol there beside her—still breathing, Deor was glad to see, but quite unaware of the world.

Morlock took a wedged digging tool from a pocket in his sleeve and Deor did the same. They went to work on the base of the wall.

The first inch or so was painted stucco; after that they started getting into the dried fungus. Deor wondered whether they should cut breathing masks for themselves from their cloaks, but Morlock didn't even seem to consider it, so he didn't bother to make the suggestion. The nightmares were not physical; they were just trapped in the dried flesh of the fungus, like an old man's soul in a dying body.

The feeling of dread that he had dreaded came over Deor with startling suddenness. For a dwarf, digging is usually a happy occasion, but this was not like digging through honest dirt and rock. The outer layers of fungus were oddly crispy, like mummified human flesh. The core of the wall was harder, less layered, like ancient dried-out bone. Deor knew that he was lying there next to Morlock digging through a wall. But at the same time he felt that he was digging into a gigantic skull. Soon they would break through and confront the gigantic carnivorous maggots that had devoured the giant's brain and were ravenous for new flesh.

“You're not my father and never were!” Morlock snarled, holding his digger like a knife. “My father is dead! His ashes rest in the Holy Halls under Thrymhaiam!”

That startled Deor out of his skull nightmare. Morlock was having a nightmare about Merlin, of course. He knew his
harven
-kin often did.

“I wish Oldfather Tyr was with us now,” he whispered to Morlock. “There was nothing that he feared.”

Morlock shook his head—not like he was disagreeing; like a man waking. Then he whispered, “We must be close to the interior. The nightmares will be thickest there.”

“Joy of joys.”

They dug.

The horror that Krida felt for mandrakes and dwarves was not hard for Deor to understand. He himself felt it for Other Folk at times, especially when they were dead. A dwarf's soul, he knew or believed, mounted into the sky and fled the world through the gateway in the west on the morning after its body's death. But there was nothing in any teaching about the souls of men and women doing the same thing. They lingered, like mist, in the dark places of the earth; they haunted graveyards and possessed dead bodies.

Deor knew where he and Morlock were and what they were doing, but at the same time he became convinced that they were digging into the mausoleum of a human graveyard. He had seen them, great buildings just like this but full of corpses rotting in boxes. And Other Folk went there and left flowers and had picnics and engaged in their bizarre and ugly mating practices on grass fed by the filth of rotting flesh. It was deeply disgusting. He hated those places and he couldn't imagine why he had come to this one. Soon they would break through to the interior and it would be filled with bodies. But they would not be dead bodies. Not anymore. . . .

His digger broke through into empty darkness. Not far away were staring eyes, gleaming silver in the moonlight.

“Stand away,” Morlock directed, and Deor didn't need to be told twice. When Deor was clear, Morlock swung around so that his feet were facing the pitted wall. He braced himself and kicked until the hole was big enough to crawl through.

“Rope,” he said.

Deor was a little surprised that Morlock was about to hang himself, but on reflection he decided that it was really the only escape. He handed Morlock the bight of rope hanging from his belt.

Morlock drove his digger between two paving blocks and anchored the rope to it. Then he loosed the bight and, with the free end in hand, slithered feet first into the hole.

Morlock saw eyes—dozens of them staring at him in the bar of moonslight falling after him into the cellar. He heard the hiss of many mouths breathing, smelt the stink of many bodies and their waste.

“Kelat!”

“That's me!” said a voice just behind him. “You killed me and buried me once, but you won't do it again!”

Something sharp slashed the side of his neck. He leaped away but not before his blood fell burning to the ground.

The moon-wounded darkness of the pit gave way to a blood-colored twilight as Morlock's blood burned on the fungal floor. Kelat stood astonished in the dim, fiery light, watching burning blood drip off the sharp stake in his hand.

If there was ever any chance of talking to Kelat through the haze of nightmares, it was obviously lost. Morlock kicked the stake out of Kelat's hand and continued the kick to land with his full weight on the pit of Kelat's stomach.

Kelat oofed out the air in his lungs but was not so bemused that he didn't get a grip on Morlock's foot. He twisted it viciously. Morlock was compelled to spin with the twist, or limp through the rest of his life. He landed on his back in a pile of filth. Kelat charged him, shouting in a language Morlock didn't know; he thought it might be Vraidish. He kicked Kelat in the knees and the stranger went down, striking his head against the cellar wall. He did not get up again.

Morlock climbed to his feet and went over to check on Kelat. He was still breathing, thank God Sustainer. Morlock hefted up the twitching stranger, clearly in the grip of a nightmare, and stuffed him like a sack of beans up through the gap in the cellar wall. Deor began to help from the other side, and soon the way was clear for him to leave.

He turned and looked at the Khnauronts. They were huddled up against the far wall, watching him in the dim light of the fire burning on the floor. He was tempted to let the fire burn—let them all die. They deserved it. But it wasn't up to him to decide what they deserved. He stamped out the bloodfire and climbed up the rope through the gap into the free air of the alley.

Deor was there, examining Kelat's skull with his fingers as the stranger breathed stertorously and muttered gibberish or Vraidish.

“He'll live,” the dwarf said, banishing at least one of Morlock's fears. “We weren't exactly quiet.”

“Let's get away quickly.”

“Sew you up first,” Deor said, taking an incombustible needle and thread from a couple of pockets.

“You'll burn your fingers,” Morlock said.

“So what?” Deor said, and had him sit down in the street as he deftly sewed up Morlock's wound (jagged, but not serious), then smeared it with a healing paste, then anointed his fingers with the same.

“Thanks,
harven
.”

“You'd do the same.”

They went to pick up Kelat and started carrying him down the alleyway.

Thains with long hooded spears began stepping out of the shadows.

“Chaos in a wheelbarrow!” Deor cursed.

They dropped Kelat in the street.

Into the moonslit street strode a tall woman with white hair, wearing a red cloak.

“Surrender, Guardians!” called out Noreê in undisguised triumph. “You will not take the prisoner away. But you will explain yourselves at Station tomorrow.”

“You have no authority to stay us, Vocate,” Morlock called back.

“I do have the
power
to do it, Vocate,” Noreê replied. “Stand away from the prisoner and you won't be hurt.”

“Approach the prisoner and you
will
be hurt,” Morlock replied. “What I say, I say to you all. I am on the Graith's business and I will kill anyone who stands in my way. Maintain the Guard!”