The Wide World's End (21 page)

C
HAPTER
N
INE

The Lacklands

Deor's food ran out within a day and they were thrown back largely on the resources of Morlock's travel rations. They travelled eastward through the foothills of the Whitethorns, a meandering path that kept them well away from inhabited lands. But they saw little that approached game, except a few scrawny goats that were more trouble than they were worth to catch. So Deor declared after several hours of trying to catch one, anyway.

Mushrooms, however, were relatively plentiful, and Deor delighted in each different patch of fungus that he found. Kelat ate none of it, and even Morlock was (to Deor's mind) surprisingly choosy. But in general the world seemed ill-stocked with foodstuffs.

“There is some hunger everywhere, and all the time, these days,” Kelat said. “The sea yields better food than land lately, but that means that too many people fish the waters.”

“Things aren't so bad in the Wardlands,” Deor said.

Kelat shrugged. “I hardly remember it. That . . . that stone was in my head. In the wide world, it
is
so bad, and worse every year.”

Kelat thought that the best chance of finding Rulgân Silverfoot was in Grarby, a town full of monsters on the northeast coast of the Sea of Stones, where Rulgân was worshipped as a god.

“I remember it,” Morlock said. “Is Danadhar still there?”

“The God-speaker?” Kelat was surprised and impressed.

“He wasn't the God-speaker when I knew him,” Morlock said. “But that was long ago.”

“He has been God-speaker as long as anyone remembers,” Kelat said dubiously.

Morlock shrugged and said no more.

Eventually they had to leave the foothills and travel south.

“We must be careful as we cross the River Tilion,” Kelat said. “The Vraidish tribes are settled there, and their Great King is opposed to any dealing with dragons.” He rubbed the side of his head ruefully. “I understand that better now, I think.”

Morlock said nothing to that either.

No one lived in the Whitethorns or their shadow, but when they turned south they found themselves crossing land that had been cleared and levelled for farming, woods that had been thinned by axemen harvesting the wood for building and fuel, roads that had been worn in the land by the passage of people and their goods from town to town. They saw all the evidence of human habitation except for the humans.

They came at last in the evening to a town built up at a crossing of three little roads. There was a market in the center of town; there were fetish poles for the Old Gods of Ontil; there were houses that Deor guessed were hundreds of years old—a great age for a dwelling not made by a dwarf.

All the windows were dark; no smoke came from any chimney; no word or footstep other than their own could be heard in the whole place. The town was dead; even the animals were gone.

“What happened here?” Deor asked.

“The world is dying,” Kelat replied. “The people went south, I guess.”

Morlock said nothing, but found a decent-sized house with a fireplace. No one felt like using one of the empty beds, so they lay in their bedrolls on the floor by the fire. They didn't bother foraging for food, but made a thin meal of the travel rations from Morlock's pack. For once, Deor did not complain.

They rose early and left the sad, hollow town behind them. They saw more during that long day as they walked. Toward evening they stopped in another, this one on a fairly wide roadway running from west to east.

“I think this is the Old Ontilian road to Sarkunden,” Morlock said.

“I think it may be the big road to Sarkunden,” Kelat agreed. “I don't know who made it.”

“It's in very good repair.”

“Well, it hasn't had much use lately, has it?” Deor snapped.

Morlock didn't answer, but started rapping on the wooden wall of what seemed to have been a sauna.

“No one's home, Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.

“The wood is sound,” Morlock said, “and probably sealed against water.”

“What are you talking about, harven?”

“This walking is tedious and slow. Let's make a cart.”

“And where are the draft animals who will pull this cart?”

Morlock grunted. “You'll figure it out,” he said eventually.

Morlock started pulling the sauna apart plank by plank while Deor and Kelat ransacked the town and the nearby farmhouses for tools. The oddly shaped cart was done well before midnight; the dwarf and the master maker could work as well by coldlight as by daylight. But Morlock worked through the night at the village smithy forging chains of cunningly joined links. When Deor and Kelat awoke before dawn, Morlock was fitting the last pieces into place.

“What is this ugly thing?” Deor demanded furiously.

“Pedal-powered cart,” Morlock said. “Gears and impulse-wells to magnify our efforts. Steering oar is in back, as you see.”

“And I'm supposed to plant my stony ass on one of those bare boards and pedal you across the unguarded lands, is that it?”

“Refashion the seat as it suits you. We can find padding around town. Two of us will pedal while the third one steers. We'll go faster this way, if the roads don't get much worse than this one.”

“And if they do?”

“We'll carry, push, or abandon it.”

Deor deftly bound up their bedrolls over the wooden seats, examined the wheels, gears, and chains, muttering prayers or imprecations in Dwarvish, and finally climbed aboard. “I guess we should pedal and you steer at first? Until we all get the sense of the beast?”

Morlock nodded and they climbed aboard, piling their packs in the fourth seat. Kelat climbed aboard more hesitantly.

“Is this magic?” he asked. “I have had bad luck with magic.”

“Just a new way to get work done,” Deor assured him. “We'll earn every mile we make in this thing.”

They put their feet to the pedals and got under way.

Their way was downhill, more often than not, but when the undulations of the land led the road upward, Morlock released some of the stored energy from the impulse wells and also changed the gear ratios. In spite of that, a couple of times they had to get out and push the contraption over the rise. Then they had the terrifying delight of the long, steep ride to the bottom of the hill, impulse collectors grinding against the wheels all the way down.

The vehicle had its advantages; even Deor was forced to admit it. The worst thing about it was the jolting. It was impossible even to get used to it, as the jolt changed depending on the road surface and the grade of incline. But they were going much faster than they had been, speeding past empty towns, gray lifeless fields, cold green woods.

Deor would have complained a thousand thousand times during the day, but he held his peace so as to not alarm Kelat. His only audible protest was when he innocently suggested that their vehicle be dubbed the Hippogriff.

They rode the grumbling Hippogriff in the day and slept hard at night, despite their thin rations. They talked as they travelled—Deor the most; Kelat very little; Morlock least of all.

They had grown so used to dead fields and empty towns that they were surprised one morning to see long tangling pillars of smoke arising from a nearby hill. The buildings there were clearly occupied, at least in the center of town. That center was surrounded by a wall, stitched together with mismatched lumber repurposed from demolished buildings, or so Deor's practiced eye told him.

“Shall we risk it?” asked Deor, who was steering.

“No,” said Kelat.

“Yes,” said Morlock.

Deor agreed by steering the oar toward the hill and its town.

The guards at the gate were armored with bowl-like helmets and mattress-like padding. They were weaponed with ill-made wooden pikes, and something about their slouching stance and cheery grins made Deor think these were not professional soldiers—at least, not until recently. They watched the approach of the Hippogriff with open-mouthed surprise, not even coming to guard when Deor applied the impulse collectors and braked the cart in front of them.

“Greetings, sentinels!” said Deor in what he hoped was decent enough Ontilian.

“Heartheld thingings, strangers!” one of the guards said. “Have you been come to embrickle the highhearts of High Town?”

“No, we are passing through,” said Deor, his hopes of communication fading.

“Entrucklements for gift-and-get we have been bringing roadwise,” Kelat remarked, surprising Deor. But of course Kelat was from here, or near here.

The guards received his remark quite cheerfully, and seemed to welcome them in about twelve times as many syllables as Deor thought was really necessary.

As the guards were laboriously opening the gate to admit the Hippogriff, Kelat said, “I told them we were just passing through, but we might have things to trade. They seem excited by the offer.”

Morlock nodded and looked sour. Deor wondered why: perhaps it was just the torrent of warm stink that swept over them when the gate swung open.

There was a sort of animal pen full of odd pink and brown beasts inside the wall. Attached to it was a building that was clearly, from its stench, a slaughterhouse. There were guards armed with pikes and scythes around the slaughterhouse and the pen.

Kelat made a sound of involuntary disgust, and Morlock's bitter expression became, if possible, bitterer. Deor didn't understand why at first, and then he realized that the animals were men. Men and boys, it seemed. Although Deor was not always sure whether Other Ilk were male and female, the absence of clothing helped here.

“Let's get out of here,” he said to his companions in Wardic. “These savages have nothing for us, nor we for them.”

“Not yet,” said Kelat reluctantly. “The Regent of the Great King will want to know about this. We . . . I should learn as much as I can.”

Morlock nodded grimly. They followed their guide, pedaling the Hippogriff up the winding narrow streets of High Town.

Well over half the townsfolk seemed to be female—perhaps as much as four-fifths, by Deor's count. The women and girls were blank-faced, as if they were trying to remember something they had forgotten. None of them were armed. All the men were. None of the men seemed to be doing anything resembling physical work—fetching and carrying; cleaning; working. All the women were.

They came at last to a biggish house covered (recently) with silver paint, its front doors adorned with stained glass windows. The guard verbosely invited them to dismount and greet-and-be-greeted by the High Baron of High Town.

The High Baron of High Town was sitting on the floor of his entryway playing a game of checkers with an empty-faced young girl. He waved her away without speaking and stood to greet his visitors.

The High Baron of High Town wore splendid clothes that had clearly been made for someone else—probably several other people. His shining scarlet-and-gold tabard did not quite cover his belly; his skin showed through the lacing of his blue suede boots, and one of the seams was burst; his shining robe of office had gotten tangled with his feet, and his coronet had slipped down over his left ear. There were grease stains among the gold stitchings on his tabard.

“Bold baroner of High Town's high barony,” began Kelat, “it is we who have been come to gift-and-give both things-of-word and things-of-things passing-wise from foothills coming to vale of Tilion going.”

The High Baron looked upon him contemplatively for a moment or two and then said, “Perhaps one of you other gentlemen . . . ?”

“Well,” said Deor with some relief, “he—” pointing at Morlock “—isn't gentle, and I'm not a man. Still, maybe we can do some talking.”

“I certainly hope so. I certainly do. Some of our rustics have lost the clear path of Old Ontilian and have been become tangle-tugged in slang-sloughs lost.”

“Uh. I suppose so.”

“But I hope that you, gentle and man, are not considering immigrating into High Town? We have as many mouths as we can feed these days. Unless you have. . . . Perhaps somewhere safely hidden nearby . . . ? I think we understand each other.”

“No,” said Morlock.

“You have no females—no women or girls?”

“Not with us,” Deor said.

“We will treat them well. They will live through the year and the long winter to follow, and how many people can say that in these dark cold days? The price will be as nothing, to men as devoted as yourselves.”

“You waste your time,” Morlock said.

“I have more time than anyone! It is a luxury I enjoy wasting. All this was my idea, so they made me High Baron, when I was only the village usurer down in Low Town a few years ago. We will accept females here in High Town, one for every two males who surrender themselves to our food pens. The women do work and have other uses; the men go to feed the community. It is the only way we survived so long as other towns faded into the dust.”

“No,” said Kelat.

The High Baron chuckled. “Well, I thought not. No one would carry a woman while travelling. But we will accept you as immigrants of the usual sort—straight into the slaughterhouse.”

Armed men stepped out of the shadows of the hall. They wore shirts of overlapping bronze plates and carried curved swords and were not at all like the jolly cannibals at the gate.

Morlock said, in a conversational tone, “Tyrfing.”

The black-and-white crystalline blade burst through the stained glass in the doors and flew to Morlock's right hand.

The High Baron goggled at the sword and the armsmen did the same. Morlock seized the High Baron by the loose skin in his fat neck and held the black-and-white blade to the Baron's throat.

“We're leaving,” Deor said. “Don't try to stop us, or you'll need a new baron.”

The armsmen didn't look heartbroken at this thought, but didn't try to stop them either. They backed out the door, Morlock dragging the sputtering baron along for the ride. He sheathed Tyrfing in the scabbard on his pack and sat down in the back bench, making the baron stand in front of him.