The Wide World's End (46 page)

The snow crust there was deeper and more stable. They pitched camp for the night.

“We should have brought firewood from the
Viviana
,” Kelat said.

“No fires on this trip,” Morlock said.

“What keeps us from freezing at night?”

“You will, Prince Uthar,” Ambrosia said. “You're a furnace, burning fuel night and day. Did you know it? All we need do is contain the heat that you, and I, and the others here generate as a matter of course. Morlock or I can shepherd that heat, keeping it within a shelter, as we kept it in the balloons of the
Viviana
.”

Kelat looked relieved at this, but Deor gave a sidelong glance and said, “I don't like it,
harvenen
. Long watches in the visionary realm are a burden you have already born to your harm. Kelat and I will go fetch some firewood.”

Ambrosia said flatly, “No. We can't carry firewood enough to last us to the edge of the world, and we're unlikely to find any on the road, unless you think you can make a bonfire out of ice-trees. This is the only way, Deortheorn,” she added in a gentler tone.

“There's another way,” Deor said stubbornly. “Share your burden. Teach us how to do it.”

Morlock met Ambrosia's eye. She nodded briskly. “The Sight is a treacherous gift for a ruler,” she said. “But
harven
Deor has a point.”

“I always have a point,” Deor admitted, “though I usually manage to stab myself with it.”

They set up their occlusion and ran a census on their food. It wasn't much to reach the end of the world with, much less to walk all the way back.

Deor said to Kelat, whose face fell approximately one face-length when he saw how small the rations would be, “Well, look on the bright side. We may not have to walk back.”

“Because we'll be dead, you mean?” Kelat said calmly. “That might be just as well. Starvation's an ugly death.”

Morlock was impressed with the youth's steadiness. He did childish things, like refuse to wear a face mask in the coldest air in the world. But he was not a child.

“If it comes to that,” Morlock said, “there are ways to survive without food.”

Deor stared at him. “Oh?”

“Yes. We might absorb the tal of the local beasts and plants directly. It would keep life in our bodies, anyway.”

“What's the downside? I can tell by your face there's a downside.”

“It may change our bodies.”

“Ach. Well, troubles never come singly.”

“And a stitch in time saves nine.”

“A stitch or nine is exactly what you'll need when I'm done with you,
harven
,” Deor said mildly.

They each ate something and then Ambrosia and Kelat wrapped themselves in their sleeping cloaks and lay back to back. Deor stayed awake for a while and Morlock took him through the first lessons of the Sight. It did not go as badly as it might have, and Morlock was strangely moved to think that his
harven
-kin and oldest friend might become a dwarvish seer—a rare thing in the world, if not absolutely unheard of.

Morlock watched intermittently all through the night. The occlusion, in fact, trapped most of their heat, but he set a sentinel mannikin to wake him every few hours to make sure the shelter had not grown too cold.

When day came they struck camp without eating and began the long walk northward on the narrow road paved with ice and the sun's death. The cleft of the road was always before them; their path ran a little below the level of the snow fields, and there was often drifting snow to contend with. The day was but little warmer than the night; the heat drawn away from the sun seemed mostly to stay aloft. Kelat rarely wore his face mask but Morlock didn't warn him again; he was not the boy's mother.

They walked, with a few breaks, until sunset. Then they made camp, ate a little, and Kelat and Ambrosia stayed up while Morlock and Deor turned in.

And that was how it went: day after day in the endless plain of snow and ice. The biggest difference most days was in who would hold the watch at night.

They talked some as they walked. But, in truth, a time came when they had said most of what they had to say to each other, and each walked with his or her own thoughts.

Morlock's daydreams largely focused on Aloê. Rarely in their marriage had they been apart so long or so far. His longing for her was by now the principal concern of his waking life. It dwarfed hunger, thirst, cold, and fear. The hope of her, the golden warmth of the thought of her, kept him moving. The only way back to her was ahead. His long, regular strides were like the beat of a song, a song that had one word:
Aloê . . . Aloê . . . Aloê. . . .

It was not all monotony, though. Occasionally, there were monsters.

One day they found they had passed from the flat, snowy plains to a bumpier region of snow-covered hills. The hills bristled with black-hearted ice trees. The bloodless sun above lit the hills with searing brightness. Morlock drew his mask over his eyes and stared down at the ground. So he wasn't the first to see it.

“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said at his elbow. “One of those hills is moving.”

Morlock looked up and saw: a hill that stood just to the left of their path lurched up from the ground. They could see sky beneath it through three stumpy legs or roots that still touched the ground.

“Is it a plant?” wondered Deor. “Or . . . ?”

It pulled one of its legs loose from the ground. The leg looked oddly like one of the trees on the beast's back: crystalline and spiky, veined with darkness.

A second leg came loose, and then the third.

Morlock remembered shapes he had not understood when seen from the air: vast hill-sized shapes moving through the snow. This. These, rather: they should assume that all the hills were the three-legged hulking beasts.

It took a step, and the ground shook. The step was toward them.

“Move,” said Ambrosia, but they were all moving already.

Now more hills were shaking, streams of snow flying off them in the wind like strands of white hair.

“Think they eat things like us?” Deor speculated.

“Does it matter, if they kill us first?” Kelat replied.

“It may to them. Think how disappointed they'll be! ‘Oh, no! Dwarf-meat again!'”

“That what your mother used to say, you think?”

Deor glanced at Morlock, rolled his eyes, and laughed with (it seemed to Morlock) ostentatious politeness. Morlock decided he should tell Kelat about dwarvish family life so that he could make his banter more on point.

The hillbeast who had first awakened was moving faster now—as fast as they were, shuffling along on their snowshoes. It seemed to be picking up speed as it went, and now there were others bumbling along behind it. The hillbeasts on the eastern side of the road were trundling into motion also.

“Should we kick these shoes off?” Ambrosia, who was in the lead, called back.

Morlock had been thinking the same thing, but on impulse he shouted back, “No!” He waited a moment for his half-formed idea to emerge fully into being and then continued, “Slow start; slow stop.”

“Right!” Ambrosia called back after another moment. She leaped off the narrow road to the north and ran westward through the field of shuddering beasts.

“Deor! With her! Kelat, with me!” Morlock shouted. He leaped off the road, running eastward.

The cold—cruel enough on the snowy road carved by the sun's death—bit deeper than ever in the snowy fields. Morlock was glad of his mask—wished for something better. He wondered if impulse wells could be adapted to turn impulses into heat. Hm. . . . If you put impulse collectors in the shoes. . . .

A hillbeast roared behind him. Once, in a very different land than this, Morlock had heard an elephant scream when it stepped on a poisoned stake. If a thousand elephants made of glass had stepped on four thousand poisoned stakes, it might have sounded something like the hillbeast's rage.

“What are we doing?” Kelat wondered aloud, shuffling along beside him.

Morlock looked at Kelat, noticed something about his face, decided it wasn't the time to mention it. “We're sowing confusion,” he said, and jabbed a thumb over his lower shoulder.

Kelat spun about and gasped. He grabbed Morlock's arm and Morlock halted, looking over his shoulder.

One of the hillbeasts pursuing them had blundered against a hillbeast that was just beginning to rouse itself. The hillbeast in motion staggered back and raised the long lip of its gigantic body, exposing the vast mouth between its spiny root-like legs. The mouth had no teeth, but it did display a long, snakelike, thorny tongue. It screamed its thousand-glass-elephants-in-agony scream and stabbed the offending hillbeast through its side with the long, indefinitely extensible tongue. Black matter spurted out of the wound, and the attacker rolled its tongue in and out of the wound, slurping up the clumpy black fluid, whatever it was. Now the offending hillbeast, offended, struggled to its rooty feet and stabbed its attacker with its own tongue.

The beasts about them were rising up also.

“Come,” said Morlock. “We'll run until we have pursuers and double back—”

“I see!” shouted Kelat, evidently delighted, although his face didn't change expression much.

They ran back and forth for much of the day, sowing chaos among the hillbeasts. Sometimes they caught sight of Ambrosia and Deor doing the same. But as the sun began eastering, Morlock led Kelat away northward through the fields, successfully avoiding the attention of the hillbeasts, who were mostly busy feeding on each other.

They saw Deor and Ambrosia running parallel to them on the far side of the road. As dusk rose, blue from the earth, into the sky, they met on the road and set up occlusions for shelter.

The others wanted to talk about the adventures of the day, but Morlock overrode them all, saying to Kelat, “Let's have a look at your face.”

Startled, Kelat raised a gloved hand to his face. “What's wrong with it? It doesn't hurt.”

“Feel anything?” Morlock asked.

“Uh. . . . No.”

“It's frostbite,” Ambrosia confirmed, looking at the hard, white skin that showed wherever his golden beard didn't. “Oh, Uthar.”

“Sit down,” Morlock directed. “Take your gloves off and hold your hands over your face.”

Ambrosia sat next to him and closed her eyes. In moments she was in visionary rapture.

“It's starting to feel better,” Kelat said.

Morlock didn't doubt it. Ambrosia could herd the warmth from Kelat's hands and his core to thaw his frozen flesh. But if the tissue was dead . . . dead was dead.

Morlock sat, shucked his pack, unpacked his food, ate his cursory meal in three bites, and then filled his belly with water, wishing it were wine.

“I'm going to be all right,” Kelat said tentatively. If it was a question, Morlock didn't answer it. He put his food and waterbottle away and unfolded his sleeping cloak.

Ambrosia descended from vision. She opened her eyes, looked at Morlock, and shrugged.

Morlock tapped his nose, meaning,
What about his nose?

Ambrosia shook her head. It was dead (or so Morlock guessed).

“We should take care of it now,” Morlock observed.

“
You
are sure of that,” she said.

He thought this remark over. Morlock was sure, and Ambrosia was likely sure as well. But Kelat would not be.

“What do you mean?” the young Vraid said. He was still obediently holding his hands over his face. If he had as obediently worn his face mask, he would not be facing mutilation now. On the other hand, if he were merely obedient, he wouldn't be much use on a quest like this.

“Your face will be well enough, though it will have some bruising for a while,” Ambrosia said. “Your nose is in a more serious condition.”

“What's wrong with it?”

“We'll know in a couple of days. You can lower your hands now.”

They talked even less than usual that night.

The next day, Kelat wore his face mask. Morlock and Deor talked over the idea of using impulse wells to heat clothing in winter. It was purely theoretical, since they had no impulse wells or the means to make them at hand, but it was a way to combat the perpetual gnawing chill, if only in imagination. It seemed to raise everyone's spirits.

At the end of the next day they inspected Kelat's face again. The bruising was horrific: blackish purple smeared across his face, darkest on the nose. The very end of his nose was a greenish gray: gangrene was beginning.

They showed it to him in a mirror and explained what it meant.

“Cut my nose off?” he said, obviously surprised at the thought of it. “Can't you heal it? Surely you can heal it! I've seen the wonders you can do when you try.”

“The flesh is dead,” Ambrosia said with unwonted gentleness. “I'm sorry, Kelat. But dead is dead. It will have to come off.”

Kelat looked at each of them, as if he expected someone to disagree. He shouted, “No! No! I'd rather die.”

“No, you wouldn't,” Ambrosia said impatiently.

“You don't know—”

“It's you who don't know, sir. That's why you are in this uncomfortable position. But that's all that it is—not a matter of life and death.”

“It is to me!”

“Kelat, my friend,” Morlock said. “There are things worth dying for. We all believe that, or we wouldn't be here. But vanity isn't one of them.”

“This isn't vanity.”

“It is.”

Silence.

“Let me go away,” the young man said quietly. “Let me go away and die in the wilderness. You can keep my rations and have . . . have that much good from this mess.”

Ambrosia's eyes filled with tears and she looked at Morlock.

“No,” he said pitilessly. “You have not yet been of much use on this quest, young Prince Uthar, but what use you could be you still can be. We didn't bring you along to judge perfumes or the bouquets of fine vintages, you know.”