The Wide World's End (20 page)

“What does screwing Oluma have to do with that?”

“We were not
screwing
!”

“Boinking? Cleaning the carpet? Kissing the fish? Diving for pearls?”

Lundê squawked out a laugh and hurriedly stepped out the side door.

“Why do you have to be so offensive?” Denynê said plaintively. “I won't do it again!”

“It's nothing to me whether you do or you don't,” Aloê assured her.

“But you . . . you wouldn't. . . .”

“Engage in sex with my partner in a task for my order? But I do so. Constantly. I'm married to a Guardian, Denynê.”

“But before you were married. You wouldn't have. You wouldn't have. . . .”

“I did though,” said Aloê, smiling as she remembered a few wonderful moments from long ago, and some horrible ones, too—all equally pleasing somehow from this distance. “But I think I know what you mean at last,” she said, remembering her concern about whether Morlock and she would be able to work together after they started messing around. “I would say: don't worry about a problem until it is a problem.”

“And if it is?”

“We'll talk then.”

These matters, once so puzzling to the young Aloê, did not trouble her much anymore. The mystery to her in this situation was what Oluma saw in the dried-up apricot named Denynê. But that was not a mystery she had to solve, unlike the death of Earno.

She and Denynê stood and walked toward the front of the house. Oluma was standing with her bag just outside the door of the kitchen, shifting nervously from foot to foot; clearly she had overheard at least part of the conversation.

They went to get their horses from the stable. She was glad to see that her seconds were both capable horse handlers. Aloê hadn't exactly grown up with horses herself, but knowing how to ride and tend to the beasts was a useful skill that she had been compelled to learn . . . and that certain males who lived with her had never learned very well. She smiled as she saddled up Raudhfax, wondering how they were doing.

As they rode out into the brisk spring evening, they passed by a big house in the shadow of the Big Rock. The Arbiter was standing in its arched doorway, but she turned aside as Aloê and her seconds passed.

“I can't imagine what's gotten into the Arbiter!” fretted Oluma. “It's almost as if she dislikes you.”

Aloê slipped this matter into her mental pocket containing all the mysteries she didn't have time to solve, and rode away to the field where her dead friend lay waiting for her.

The pale golden sun was gone from the gray field beside the quiet little brook; it was nearly gone from the sky. Earno's body lay on its back in a private pool of sunlight, staring at the cool blue-edged clouds with empty eyes. The anchors of the stasis spell, seventeen of them, ringed the body with their pointed faces turned inward, like pale chipmunks standing at attention.

“Is this how you found him, Vocate?” Oluma asked.

“No—that's not how it was at all.” Aloê thought back to that terrible day. “He was alive when we came in sight of him. We were riding up from the south, Morlock and I. The others were beyond the stream, shepherding the Khnauronts toward it. Earno was on horseback—and Deor, he is never on horseback if he can help it. Noreê was walking next to him, talking about something. I'd never seen them so close together by choice. Deor hates her.

“Earno saw us and smiled. He rode his horse across the stream. When he was in the middle of it, that great wound opened up in his throat and he fell down dead in the stream. He was dead when we pulled him out of the water.”

“How quickly did you set up the stasis field?” asked Denynê.

“Almost as soon as we realized he was dead. Though there was some dispute about it.”

“Oh?”

“Yes: Deor wanted his body incinerated and the ashes decently buried. Dwarves are like that about people they care for. But Noreê and Morlock ignored us and started setting up the stasis spell. That was funny, too, because—” She didn't finish.

“They hate each other,” Oluma finished. “That's what people say, anyway.”

“Yes, but they agreed on this without even talking. Perhaps that's the only way they could agree on anything.”

Aloê circled the body slowly, looking for details.

“I've never seen a body in stasis before,” admitted Oluma. “It's amazing! You can still see the water droplets in his hair and on his skin! His clothes are heavy with it. His eyes are as clear as if he were still alive.”

It
was
remarkable, and that fact helped Aloê keep her patience. “What else do you see?” she asked.

“I would have expected more blood,” Denynê remarked. “But perhaps the stream washed it away.”

“Yes!” Oluma agreed. “The lips of the wound are—they are almost dry and . . . and
crumbly
.”

Aloê nodded in agreement. She had seen the same thing, but it was so odd she wanted to know that the others saw it, too.

“I'm going to counter-inscribe the spell,” she told her seconds. “Stand a few paces away, please.”

They stepped back into the ring of shadow surrounding the shining corpse. Aloê took a diamond-tipped stylus from her pocket and crouched down by one of the spell-anchors. She carefully inscribed an eversion rune on its outer face. She felt the emotional bite of the spell taking hold, but it was a thin whisper against the silent roar of the stasis spell. In the end, she had to inscribe variations on each of the anchors before the light faded and Earno's face fell sideways, giving the wound in his throat an unpleasant likeness to a wry mouth.

She used a coldlight, a mirror, and a magnifying lens to examine the final image in the summoner's dead eyes. It was, as she had feared, nothing useful—the sky, apparently, seen through a layer of water.

Aloê breathed through her mouth during most of this process because of the stench rising from the open wound.

“I think this stasis spell must have failed,” Oluma remarked, kneeling beside her and following her technique with interest.

“Hm?” Aloê murmured.

“That stink!” Oluma said cheerfully. She was
not
breathing through her mouth. “That's from a body that's been dead a few days.”

“I can't see either Morlock Ambrosius or Noreê Darkslayer making such a mistake,” remarked Denynê dryly from well outside the stink zone.

“Not separately,” Oluma agreed. “But perhaps together? Maybe they were working at cross-purposes. Maybe that's where the error crept in.”

“Possibly,” said Aloê, driven into speech, “but not probably. You must consider that Earno was murdered before his death—perhaps some days before.”

“Uh? Oh! I forgot about that part.”

Aloê would never forget about that part. She said next something that she knew she must but had dreaded since the moment she undertook this task: “Let's look at that wound.”

“Yes!” cried Oluma, as if her best-beloved had asked her to dance at the festival of Harps.

“Gleh,” Aloê replied indistinctly.

She held the dead man's head steady while Oluma probed the wound with a thin, faintly glowing scrutator and a polished speculum on a long stem. The edges of the wound were gray as a piece of moldy bread, and they were almost serrated in appearance.

“Never seen anything like it,” Oluma admitted. “Denynê, honey, could you have a look here?”

“Don't call me that!” hissed the healer.

“Denynê?” Oluma asked, bewildered. “I thought—”

“Never mind!” Denynê hissed, and bent over the corpse. “Eeuuuccch.”

“You're being disrespectful to the dead, dear.”

“He'll never know it!” snapped the healer. “Hm. Hm. I've never seen anything like this either. Severed blood vessels the proximate cause of death, of course. The throat wound looks almost as if it were sutured, and the sutures were somehow removed, and the process of decay hastened. Oluma—”

“Sweetheart?”

“
Shut. Up. With. That
.”

“I'm only—”

“Only do this: put that scrutator next to the severed jugular.”

“Which one is the—?”

“Any of the big blood vessels that have been cut through. Please. If you don't mind.”

Oluma shrugged and did as Denynê asked. “You see?” Denynê said to Aloê, genuinely excited. “The ends are frayed and somewhat grayish. What happened to the integument happened to them as well.”

“Excellent.” Aloê had drawn the same conclusion about the throat wound, but she hadn't noticed the blood vessels. “There was never any suture, I think,” she added. “The force binding the wounds together was immaterial, a sealing spell not so very different from the stasis spell I just counter-inscribed.”

“What broke the seal?” asked Oluma. “Was it made to dispel after a certain stretch of time, or—”

“The stream!” said Denynê.

“Yes: that,” Aloê said. “Running water has a talic presence, almost like a living being. It can shatter certain types of spells. Earno was murdered some time before he died, several days' travel up the Road, perhaps. Then the murderer put this seal upon their work and walked away, in the certain knowledge that Earno would come to grief before he reached A Thousand Towers.”

“Would such a spell require anchors, like the stasis spell?” asked Denynê.

“Yes.” Aloê traced her finger from one side of the wound up to the corpse's jaw. “Do you see anything here?”

Denynê and Oluma both looked closely. Oluma tapped the blunt end of the scrutator several times and the light it shed increased markedly.

“The skin is very loose,” Oluma said. “Earno was a man of a certain age.”

“Loose . . . and fragile also,” Denynê said. “I see a line of disruption on the surface. It looked almost like an old scar for a second. But there is no scar—no gathering of tissue below the surface.”

“A stress mark from the spell, I think,” Aloê said. “There are others. We may find physical anchors at the end of the stresslines.”

“We will need to make incisions,” said Oluma with a certain satisfaction.

“Yes, but we will also need to follow the trail of the summoner back up the Road to find the scene of the actual murder. Are either of you gifted trackers?”

The healer and the gravedigger both looked a little blank in the scrutator's pale light.

“Then,” Aloê said, “one of us should go back to ask for assistance from the Arbiter of the Peace.”

Oluma's face was growing less bemused and more contented every moment. She would soon have the vocate to herself and have a chance to make up for previous missteps. So Aloê guessed, and she almost hated to say what she had to say next: “Oluma, you had better go.”

“Me?” cried the necrophor, startled. “Why me?”

“I expect you know the Arbiter better than Denynê does, and you certainly know her better than I do.”

“Er. Yes. There is that. I am a people person,” the gravedigger observed.

“Hurry back,” Aloê said.

Soon Oluma had mounted her steed and was clattering away in the night and Aloê and Denynê were undressing Earno's dead body to cut him open.

“Oluma really would be better for this task, I think,” Denynê ventured to say, as she selected instruments from a rollup carrier.

“Possibly,” said Aloê. “But I don't trust her.”

Denynê did not pretend to not understand what Aloê was talking about. “I think,” she said at last, “there is no malice in her. It is her sense of humor. I'm afraid. . . . Well, they tell me I don't have one.”

“Nothing's duller than someone who makes everything into a joke,” Aloê said. “Unless they're actually good at it. I don't think Oluma is.”

“Well, it was probably best to send her after the Arbiter. She knows Ulvana far better than I do, and they seem to get along well.”

Ulvana. Ulvana. The name struck a chord in Aloê's memory. “Is this the Honorable Ulvana Claystreet, from A Thousand Towers?” she asked.

Denynê thought long before answering. “I don't know her surname,” she said at last, “and, of course, Arbiters have to forswear all other ranks and associations, much like your own order. But I think she did move here from A Thousand Towers. Did you know her there?”

Aloê was listening in her mind to another voice, screaming,
Love! You unspeakable trull! Don't you see how he hates you?
The voice was her voice, and she was trying hard to remember the face of the woman she had screamed at more than a century ago. It might be the same face as the Arbiter here in Big Rock. It might be.

“Not really,” said Aloê at last. “But I think we did meet at least once, long ago.”

Denynê nodded without much interest and stuck a thin bright blade into Earno's dead white face.