The Wide World's End (53 page)

“Did she jump or was she pushed?” Aloê snapped back.

“If I understand you, Vocate Aloê, you are suggesting that the High Arbitrate may have killed Ulvana in secret to prevent her testimony today.”

“It seems possible, at least.”

“It seems irrelevant, at best. Unless her testimony is key to your case.”

“No. I have stated my case. It is time for the witnesses to ascend to the Witness Stone.”

“May I speak?” Naevros called up from the floor.

“You may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone,” Noreê said.

“That's just it. I don't intend to present a defense. Neither does my junior colleague. We will accept death or exile at the Graith's choosing, or your vengeancer's alone.”

“Hm.” Noreê allowed herself a cold smile and turned to Aloê. “What do you say, Vengeancer?”

“I'll abide by the Graith's decision, or exercise the prerogative if we can't come to an agreement. But I think the accused should stand together in punishment; they are all equally guilty.”

“We can save part of a day if the summoners also waive their defense,” Noreê said, without much sign of hope. “Lernaion, what say you? Do you admit your guilt?”

“I defer to the judgement of my elder peer,” said Lernaion.

“Bleys: will you admit your guilt?”

This was the moment that horrible old man had waited for. He did not speak at first, but pretended to consider. Then he lifted his head high and cried out, “Waive my defense? I might do so for the good the Graith and the Guard, to which I have devoted the entirety of my very long life. But I will not waive, for the convenience of you, my fellow Guardians, or for the well-being of anyone in the world, my defense of the Wardlands. Everything, everything that the dedicated young vengeancer has told you is true. And it is not all. I have many secret deeds of blood and fear to my credit. I have killed—extorted—threatened—seduced—corrupted—stolen. These are crimes, if you please, if we stood in one of the courts of the unguarded lands. But we do not. All that I have done, all that I have ever done, was done to maintain the Guard.”

“Summoner Earno,” said Noreê coldly, “you may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone—”

“Is that a threat?” shouted the red-faced old summoner. “I tell you, young Noreê, that I have come here expressly to testify on the Stone! I will speak, not in my defense, but in the defense of the Wardlands and in defense of my colleagues too shamed and bemused to speak for themselves. I have suffered; I have been beaten; I have endured night and day the torments of nightmares in that hellhole you consigned me to; I have kept the thin, fragile thread of life unbroken in my ancient body for this, and this alone: to speak and be heard where I could not be silenced! Lead me to your Witness Stone and let the Graith read the truths written in my heart!”

His voice broke on the last word. Aloê, glancing around the Long Table, saw that many of her peers were visibly moved at Bleys' performance. That was the first time she suspected that the murderers of Earno would escape exile.

“The Stone is in its usual place,” Illion pointed out mildly. There were a few laughs at this, but most of the vocates still seemed taken with Bleys' dramatic performance. He strode over to the dais of the Witness Stone and laboriously climbed the steps to reach it.

“You will wait for us to establish rapport with the Stone first, Summoner Bleys,” Noreê called down the Long Table.

“Take your time,” replied the great seer calmly.

Illion was standing next to the Stone: he placed a hand on it, and his eyes began to glow with rapture. He held out his other hand to Baran, who stood by him. Baran took the hand and closed his eyes. In time, he too showed the signs of visionary ascent.

It did take time, but one by one the vocates, of varying levels of skill, joined the rapport with the Stone. The only exception was Gyrla, who jumped down contemptuously without saying a word.

They were one, in the end, though all were different, and Noreê spoke in them and through them, saying, “Put your hands on the Stone, Bleys, and accept rapport.”

Bleys smiled—they felt rather than saw it—and placed one finger on the stone. Rapport was instantaneous; he was already in the visionary state.

Bleys said with his mouth, “I am innocent of Impairing the Guard. All I have done, all I have enlisted others to do, I have done to defend the Wardlands.”

They heard the words only vaguely with their ears. They knew them for truth in their hearts.

All stood separate in their shared mind for meditation then. Aloê had time to think:
What he believes is true is different from what we may know to be true. He may have Impaired the Guard without intent
. But she also knew that most of her case against him was already undone, irrelevant in the face of his shocking admission.

“Why did you murder Summoner Earno?” she finally found the strength to ask.

The great seer turned his attention toward her, and it seemed that she was alone with him.

“I have been waiting for someone to ask me that, my dear. Thank you. Once when I was walking the long roads in the empty lands east of the Sea of Stones, I met an odd entity, a sort of unbeing. . . .”

Aloê later learned that others had asked the same question, or a similar one, and that all the vocates had been drawn into Bleys' meditation as if each alone was in rapport with him.

It seemed to her that she could see with his eyes, that she ached with his feet, grew short of breath and chill as shadows rose from the dusty earth of the empty lands. She knew somehow that it had been many years ago—shortly after the death of the Two Powers in Tychar.

The unbeing came upon Bleys as he was making a fire to warm himself. He sensed it with his insight. It tried to kill him with a weapon that had no name—but she recognized it. It was a kind of mist that came from nowhere and everywhere. It began to break down Bleys into his component selves, as acid breaks down a piece of meat.

But Bleys was not a piece of meat. He stepped outside of his body into vision and let his body dissolve and reform itself in the presence of the deadly fog, unconcerned with its fleshly agony.

In vision, Bleys saw-without-seeing the unbeing who attacked him.

He wove a path of vision around it in fifteen dimensions so that the unbeing was bewildered and could not dispel his mind as it was trying to dispel his body.

For a timeless time he meditated on the unbeing and its nature. Then he struck back, causing a little fog to condense in the locus where the unbeing presented itself.

The presence of physical matter distressed and excited the unbeing very much.

Bleys realized that the unbeing was the same type of entity that Aloê and Ambrosia had encountered in those same lands. (There was a side corridor of memory in Bleys' meditation where Aloê saw herself as he saw her, and the cool, ironic lechery of his regard made her feel greasy.)

They duelled that way for a long time with weapons of being and unbeing, of making and unmaking. But eventually their duel became a kind of conversation, where actions bore symbolic meaning.

Bleys learned that the unbeing was only one element in a class of unbeings beyond the northern edge of the world. They had once been in it, but the advent of sun and of material life had driven them out in repugnance and hatred for the new-made world. The Two Powers had been fashioned as an experiment in destroying material life, but had failed because the unbeing sent to keep them in balance had succumbed to materiality.

Bleys revealed that he was a member of a class of beings, some of which had defeated the Two Powers.

The unbeing reiterated its urgent need, shared by all of its cohort, to wipe the slate of the world clean of physical life. Because it had no thought that information should be withheld, it shared various scenarios of world-cleansing.

Bleys was curious about the domain of the unbeings in the far north. Apparently it was a fragment of this world that they had managed to sever free, redrawing the borders of the sky so that it would not be tainted with light and life. So it persisted, a fragment of a world drifting alongside its former home in the Sea of Worlds.

A thought came to Bleys that shocked even him. But he tested it over and over, and there was no flaw that he could see.

He asked the unbeing if it could teach him the skills to redraw the border of the sky and separate a part of the world into its own world.

The unbeing knew part of that knowledge and shared that with him, but the knowledge was too great for any single element of the unbeings to contain its entirety.

Bleys told the unbeing that if he and his fellow beings could know those skills, they would no longer resist, would even assist the project of the unbeings.

That was when the great collaboration began. Bleys and the unbeing fashioned an un-object of many dimensions. With it, he could communicate with the unbeing wherever he was, wherever it was.

Aloê never found the words to explain the un-object to anyone else, but she didn't need it explained to her: it hung in lightless luminescence at the center of her own mind.

With shock, Aloê realized that Bleys had incorporated the un-object into the Witness Stone itself. Even now, even now. . . .

As she let her awareness expand she became aware of many listeners, the class of unbeings in the far north beyond the wide world's end, the Sunkillers.

And over the years Bleys, with increasing single-mindedness, pursued his collaboration with the unbeings. His plan was simple: the ultimate protection for the Wardlands was to remove the adjoining lands from existence entirely. Then the Wardlands could persist as an island in the Sea of Worlds, perhaps with an artificial sun and other conveniences, and the Sunkillers could have the rest of their world to themselves.

Of course that meant that everyone and everything in the world that lived and felt and was a being would die. That was what had shocked Bleys about his own plan . . . at first.

But only at first. He was not a purveyor of justice or an avatar of mercy. He did not judge; he defended, and this was the ultimate defense, a final solution to the problem of the unguarded lands.

He enlisted others in his project: Lernaion, who took a long time to convince. Lernaion took upon himself the task of enlisting Earno, but he had bungled it somehow. Aloê sensed Bleys' rage more clearly than the details of the failure. But probably Earno was hopeless anyway. He had travelled too much in the world to sacrifice it willingly. He seemed to think he had some obligation to it, or to the people in it, that rivalled his obligation to the Guarded.

Lernaion and Bleys enlisted Naevros to do their knifework. Bleys had long ago noted Naevros' susceptibility, and the whirlwind of thoughts surrounding the vocate's seduction were tinged with cold pleasure in Bleys' mind.

Now the unbeings, the Sunkillers, were concerned. They knew from their allies in the Wardlands that beings had been sent to investigate the sun's death and that some of them were those who had destroyed the Two Powers. The unbeings did not understand and would not understand independent agency and free will. They looked on the actions of the beings approaching them as a betrayal by their allies. The unbeings would be angry, extremely resentful, if those others were not stopped somehow.

To save the Wardlands they must recall their colleagues from the edge of the world and make plans for life after the death of the sun.

Aloê felt the insidious, inevitable pull of the logic. It vibrated in her mind—in the pattern of the un-object that was party to and basis of their rapport. Aloê resisted it, rejected it. Suddenly she became aware of others doing the same. She fought harder, fought free, was alone in her own mind at last, not subject to rapport.

She descended from the visionary state.

As soon as she had pulled the world of matter and energy around her like a blanket, she shouted at Bleys: “Bleys! Break the rapport and let the vocates go or I'll smash your Stone for you again!”

“If you like, my dear,” said Bleys warmly, and the light in his eyes died. His smile, however, lived on. The vocates, as they returned to full awareness, began to shout and question and argue, and that went on for hours. But Bleys had already won: he knew it, and Aloê did, too. The vocates were frightened, and the way to drive frightened people was with more fear.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

News from Home

The four companions stood at the edge of the world and looked down at the letter.

“A trap, you think?” Morlock asked.

“Certainly,” whispered Deor in mock terror. “If you pick that up, a thousand Sunkillers will rush out from underneath it and begin biting us on the toes!”

“I suppose our friend and
harven
-kin here,” Ambrosia said, “is not aware that many magical traps are set with a kind of bait, and that picking up or accepting the bait activates the trap.”