The Wide World's End (41 page)

This was odd. Few lived east of Aflraun, and those that did weren't the type to travel to a city market or sample the secret joys of Whisper Street.

One was a dwarf. One was a Vraidish barbarian, from his hair and weaponry. One was a woman, crooked as an Ambrose, apparently the leader. The fourth was an odd one—as tall as the woman, but hunched over, he wore a long coat with sleeves and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his face. He seemed to have a pretty heavy beard.

“Greetings, travelers,” Jonon said when they were in speaking range. “Do you come in peace, war, or business?”

“Peace,” said the crook-shouldered woman Jonon had tagged as the leader.

“Have you got any food for trade?” Jonon asked. This was not an official question. But sometimes he made good purchases from food traders before they found out how much they could charge in the city markets.

“Food for ourselves; none to trade,” the woman said, disappointing but not surprising Jonon.

“Is your companion a werewolf?” Jonon asked. This
was
an official question. Wuruyaaria had made several raids against the outskirts of Aflraun and Narkunden; more were expected. They had been instructed to watch out for spies.

“Which one?” asked the woman ingenuously.

“The one that appears to be a werewolf.”

“My friend Laurentillus, here?” the woman said as if she were surprised, turning toward the shaggy one.

“If that's his name.”

“Nonsense. Laurentillus, shake hands with the guardsman.”

Laurentillus didn't move.

“Do the thing,” the woman urged. She nudged Laurentillus in the side. “The thing.”

Laurentillus started, then pulled off his right glove. He held out his right hand to Jonon. It was an undeniably human hand—calloused from much work, with an oddly hairy wrist. Jonon slapped the offered palm, causing Laurentillus to jump and withdraw suddenly.

“He doesn't seem quite human,” Jonon observed.

“Doesn't he?” said the woman, deftly slipping a coin into Jonon's still-outstretched hand.

“Well, not much.”

Another coin surreptitiously changed hands.

“Well, who am I to judge? Still, my men. . . .”

“How much more?” the woman asked briskly.

Jonon hated to use his position to squeeze money out of travelers, but times were hard; even meat was getting expensive. He glanced at the coins in his palm. They were foreign, of course; Vraidish by the look of them. “Two more of these,” he said.

She supplied them cheerfully. He followed them through the gate, chatting of this and that. He didn't want any of his underlings to squeeze any more coins out of them.

When they were well into Aflraun, and Jonon was about to turn back, the crooked woman caught sight of something and grabbed him by the arm. “Jonon, my friend,” she said, pointing at the sky over the cluttered western horizon, “what is
that
?”

He looked, but he knew what she meant even before that. “It's there sometimes, sometimes not. It keeps getting bigger. No one's sure what it is, truthfully. People say a crazy man is building something in the sky over Narkunden. Maybe it has something to do with the end of the world.”

“A crazy man, you say? Tell me more.”

After he parted company with Angustus, Morlock walked down to the southern edge of Narkunden and made camp in an open field. The next day he left his things under occlusion and wilderment and went into town to buy food and drawing paper. He had two or three different designs for a flying ship in his head and he wanted to sketch out some of the ideas before he chose between them.

Food was expensive, as he had feared after his conversation with Angustus. A loaf of fresh bread cost two fingers of gold. Fresh meat was cheaper, but a rather odd selection: most of it was from game animals and predators.

But it didn't matter much. Morlock was no epicure. He bought meat, bread, and mushrooms and set out to find drawing paper.

The cheapest place, so a dwarvish mushroom merchant told him, was Shardhut Scrivener's shop near the Lyceum. Paper and ink were agreeably cheap there, as he discovered, but the place was dense with dark-gowned savants from the Lyceum.

Morlock collected the supplies he needed and went to stand in line so that Shardhut, the warty but agreeably cheerful shopkeeper, could take his money. Shardhut had three hulking assistants who didn't seem to do anything, but perhaps Shardhut didn't trust them with the cashbox. In the general confusion Morlock might easily have walked out of the shop with the goods in hand, but he had been raised by his
harven
-father with an exaggerated sense of property.

Morlock was not a talkative type, but the rest of the customers made up for that. Three of his line-mates were writing books about the end of the world, which they hoped to have completed to great acclaim before the world actually ended, and another was writing a book about how the world was not really ending, just going through a natural phase of transition, which would bring an end to all life. Another, who did not believe in the writing of books, proved through a set of syllogisms that the world's weather was no different than it had ever been, as far as anyone could tell. Another was proving through syllogisms that nothing could be proven through syllogisms.

“What's your opinion, Citizen?” asked the man behind him in line.

Morlock mulled over his options and then said, “I have heard that the Sunkillers are responsible—malefic beings from beyond the northern rim of the world.”

There was general laughter at this. He was informed, on good authority, that there was no northern rim of the world and that, if there were, there could not be anything beyond it. He was asked to define his terms. He was asked for the physical evidence or at least eyewitness testimony to support his claims. Then a red-faced, red-haired academic in a scarlet gown said, “This gentleman has been talking to Iacomes.”

Silence fell and every eye turned to Morlock. He said, “I did talk to a colleague of yours yesterday, but he said his name was Angustus—”

“Preposterous!” shouted the red academic. “‘Angustus'! How would one even pronounce that?”

“Angustus?”

“No, it must be one of his pseudonyms. Tell me, was he a tall, dark-skinned man with dark eyes and a pleasing manner?”

“No.”

“Then it must have been him! Do you know what he has been telling my students?”

Morlock didn't answer, but the red academic didn't seem to notice. “He tells my students that it's not wrong to steal if they are hungry! Can you believe it, sir?”

There was a general murmur of outrage.

“What if the students starve to death?” Morlock asked. “Whom will you citizens teach at the Lyceum?”

“It would be a great relief to have less students,” remarked one of the academics. “Then I could write more books about the importance of education.”

There was a general titter at this citizen's expense. “
Fewer
, Arnderus, ‘
fewer
students.' You can't use
less
as an adjective with a noun denoting a set of discrete objects.”

“Except for numerical measurements,” reminded another academic.

“Oh, yes, of course.”

Arnderus turned screaming on his tormentors. He grabbed fistfuls of reed pens from a nearby stand and began stabbing at anyone within arm's reach.

“No discussions of grammar or usage, citizens!” bleated Shardhut, but it was too late; the linguistic analysis and the violence threatened to become general.

It was then that Shardhut's bulky assistants proved their worth. They waded into the fight, stripped the combatants of their goods, and tossed them into the street. In a few moments order was restored and the line to the cashbox was considerably shorter.

The conversation, when it resumed, was much more subdued, and it did not hinge on such fiercely disputed topics as the ethics of stealing or which adjective might be used with which noun. Mostly they talked about the end of the world and whether it would arrive before the next summer recess.

As Morlock was pondering the paradox of windbags who could contemplate their students starving with equanimity but were moved to blows over a point of language, he suddenly saw in his mind's eye the perfect design for his airship. He no longer needed the pens and paper. He left them on a table and walked out into the street, where the linguistic fistfight still continued. He walked past, hardly noticing, thinking of a bag of gas floating high in the air, its angry heat perpetually renewed by contact with a living mind.

Morlock was so lost in thought that he didn't notice when his basket became lighter by a couple mushrooms. But the thief in her haste let her hand brush against Morlock's left forearm. An instant later, the thief's wrist was in the grip of Morlock's left hand. The thief gasped in pain and surprise, and the guilty mushrooms fell to the ground, where hands started to scrabble for them instantly. Morlock stomped on a few fingers, and soon he was left in peace with his thief and his mushrooms.

The thief was a young woman in an academic gown. Her face was thin and grayish, her eye-sockets shadowed with dark green, like old bruises. “I'm sorry,” she muttered. “I was just so hungry. And there's a teacher at the Lyceum who says it's all right to steal if you're hungry.”

“Only if you get away with it.” Morlock let her go and recovered his mushrooms. When he looked up, she was still standing there, looking sadly at his basket packed with food.

Morlock was strongly opposed to theft, and he damned Angustus in his heart for setting children like this on a path they were utterly unprepared for. How many had ended up in jail or worse?

“I need the food,” he said harshly. Then on impulse he took a bag of gold and tossed it to her. “This should buy you something.”

She opened the bag, looked at it suspiciously. “Why are you giving me money rather than food?”

“I can't make food.”

“That implies you can make gold.”

“Eh.” Morlock walked away.

There was a draper's shop on his way and he went in and bargained for some ulken-cloth, to be sent to his camp south of the city. It was surprisingly cheap, compared to food, but he did need a lot of it, and the deal diminished his stock of gold considerably. He went back to his camp and secured his food in the wilderment there.

He turned to face the thin-faced scholar who had followed him all the way back.

She said nothing to him, so he said nothing to her. He turned away and went down the bluff to the banks of the River Nar.

He pulled sheckware buckets from a sleeve pocket, unfolded them, and filled them with yellow mud from the river. He hauled the buckets up the bluff to his campsite.

The young scholar was sitting nearby, resting her chin on her knees.

Morlock shrugged, dispelled his occlusions and wilderments, and set about his business. He made a fire, unpacked the portable forge the dwarvish makers of the Blackthorns had given him, and while he was waiting for it to rise to a useful temperature he had a drink of that mushroomy beer that the dwarves were fond of. Morlock was not fond of it, but he did feel that any drink was better than none.

“Master,” said the scholar tentatively.

“I am not your master.”

“What's your name? Mine is Varyl.”

“My name is my business.”

“Are you about to make gold?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“May I take notes?”

Morlock thought for a moment. He did some math in his head, the primitive math of economics. He almost said no to her. Then he thought of those plump, red-faced, student-hating teachers in the stationer's shop. “Eh,” he said aloud.

She took this as permission and pulled a tablet and stylus from pockets in her gown.

He ended up calling her over to the forge and explaining a few things to her. Raising the mass to equal the appropriate volume of gold involved a transition through a higher space, and he was concerned that she might not be able to follow it. But it turned out that she knew a good deal of metadimensional geometry. By the time his gold was cooling next to the forge, she had pocketed her tablet and was wandering away, chewing thoughtfully at her stylus.