The Wide World's End (44 page)

Kelat finally broke the silence, saying, “What do you mean? Liyurriu was not a werewolf?”

“Eh.”

Deor unleashed a thunderblast of semicoherent Dwarvish profanity.

Morlock ignored him and addressed himself to Kelat. “Your question does not have a yes or no answer. Liyurriu, as you may think of him, did not exist.”

Kelat sat back and pondered this.

“Do you mean he was a mere illusion?” Deor said in a more nearly reasonable voice. “Impossible, Morlock. He did work on this airship. He—” Deor's voice choked off and he turned away.

“His physical presence was real,” Morlock said, “but it was not inhabited by a mind. Not as your bodies are—as mine is.”

“What do you mean?” Deor demanded. “What
can
that mean?”

“His body was simply a sort of puppet, controlled by another mind far distant from here. A seer of great power.”

“Who? Why?” Deor demanded.

“That was what I wanted to know,” Morlock reminded him. “It is what Liyurriu would not say.”

Kelat asked, “Did you see it in your vision? Is that how you know?”

“Yes.” In his mind he could still see the tethers of talic force glimmering through the world, east and south. That was where the puppeteer of Liyurriu-puppet was.

“Why didn't Lady Ambrosia know it?”

“She has long known it, I think.”

“Then she must have had some purpose in concealing it. Shouldn't you have . . . er . . . consulted with her?”

Morlock reflected briefly and said, “No.”

Kelat reflected briefly and then climbed into the now empty bench behind Deor.

Morlock shrugged. It was no skin off his walrus. If it helped the boy sleep better, then it was all to the good. He wrapped himself in a cloak and courted sleep. It came quickly, and he was wrapped in a darkly golden dream where he lay beside his darkly golden wife, when his sleep was shattered by Deor's voice.

“Whazzit?” he said, or words to that effect.

Deor was sitting in the bench Kelat had vacated, leaning over so that his head was near to Morlock's.

“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.

“Deortheorn,” Morlock replied.

“Why did you give the knowledge of goldmaking to the Narkundans?”

“Ah.” It was an unexpected question, but his
harven
-kin deserved a fair answer. He thought it over for a while and said, “I was angry at those smug pink parasites.”

“Excuse me?”

“Those teachers who hated teaching, swarming around the stationer's shop, talking about money as if it were virtue, arguing fine points of grammar while others were starving.”

“Oh. Oh. I shall have to apologize to Ambrosia, I think.”

“About what?”

“We had an argument about something, and I'm beginning to see her point a little.”

“She usually has one,” Morlock said.

“Yes. Do you think Liyurriu is dead?”

“The entity who was using Liyurriu is not dead. The body may or may not survive the fall.”

“We're miles in the air, Morlock.”

“Werewolves drink strength and health from moonlight, it's said, and Trumpeter is bright tonight. But there is no Liyurriu, Deor. That person does not exist.”

“Eh,” said Deor pointedly, and climbed past the snoring Kelat to his own bench.

Morlock shrugged, descended again into the depths of his cloak and sleep. His dreams this time were dark and cold, and Aloê showed herself in none of them.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

The Wreck of the
Viviana

They flew the blood-warm wind from the dying sun northward, day after day. At night they drifted. Sometimes they drove the propellers with the pedals and manuals to have something to do and to keep warm. Sometimes they talked, although infrequently. They watched the distant land and the bright ring of the horizon and they waited for the end—of their journey, of the world.

They saw below them a great tidal wave of beasts fleeing from the bitter blue death that roamed the north. From their airship miles above they could see it, black, brown, and red against the pitiless white and silver of snow and ice.

North of the great migration, there were still shapes moving in the wild, wind-carved wastes of snow, but they could not quite see them or understand what they saw.

And there was a long, straight line running ahead of them, all the way to the northern horizon. When they talked, they talked a little about that.

“You know what it is,” Ambrosia said eventually. (Morlock was in trance, keeping the
Viviana
aloft.)

“I do not know what it is,” Deor replied emphatically.

“It's the weight of the sun's death. It's the footprint in the snow of the warm air we're riding north.”

“Ah,” said Deor and Kelat in chorus and with equal satisfaction.

The Ambrosii grew hollow-eyed. It was hard to spend much of a day in visionary rapture, day after day. It made the soul's relationship to the body more tenuous. If the bond finally broke, that was death. They were not about to die. But they were not well either.

One day, around noon, Deor said, “We're lower than we were. Are the gasbags getting cold?”

Morlock looked up into the body of the airship. The glass furnace was still burning its fuel. He looked back at Ambrosia. Though deep in vision, she looked at him with eyes closed, the dim glow of her irises visible through the lids. She shook her head. And the ship still seemed to be buoyant.

“Unlikely,” Morlock said. He glanced all the way around the horizon and added, “Look north.”

“The sky seems . . . bigger there,” Deor called back. “Or the land higher.”

“The sunstream is dropping down—carrying us closer to the Soul Bridge?” Kelat asked.

“Likely,” Morlock said.

He wondered if the very sky curved down at the edge of the world, closing in the world's air like a glass bowl enclosing water. The idea gave him a breathless, locked-in feeling that he disliked strongly. He said nothing of this, however.

As
Viviana
flew lower, they could see the wild beasts of the snow fields better. But it was hard to understand what they saw. Many shapes were white-on-white, their borders hard to distinguish. Others glittered like glass in the bitter, pale sun.

“Are those
plants
?” wondered Kelat, as they flew past a dense, tangled chaos of bitterly bright ice things.

“Of course!” Deor said. And Morlock agreed: it was very like a forest seen from above, except that it was a forest after an ice storm, with no green or brown to be seen. There were skeletal shapes of black, though—very like thin tree trunks and bare, wintry branches.

“What kind of creatures would feed on such plants?” Kelat wondered.

“Ice-bunnies?” speculated Deor. “Frost-deer?”

“And who feeds on the ice-bunnies?”

“Us, maybe. A nice frost-bunny stew sounds good right about now, doesn't it?”

“Not really, no.”

Morlock noticed that the glittering plants did not grow near the narrow road leading into the deep north. Nor did the hulking white shapes tend to travel there.

“What's that?” Deor called back, pointing to the east. “Quake sign?”

Morlock looked at a long, serpentine break in the snow crust. “Hope so,” he called back. But he didn't think so. Fault lines from an earthquake would have been more angular.

Later, when Morlock was in trance, keeping the
Viviana
aloft, Deor made some reference to “throwing more of us off the airship.”

Ambrosia, who had stepped past Morlock to talk to the other males, said, “You're still angry with Morlock about Liyurriu?”

Deor was taken aback. After a moment he answered, “Yes.”

“You realize there is no Liyurriu? He was simply a fraud, sent to beguile us?”

Deor said slowly, “If you say so.”

“I do say so. It stood out like Chariot in a cloudless winter sky when you looked at him in the talic realm.”

Deor lowered his head. He was remembering the werewolf sewing beside him—holding his arms when he was hanging outside the gondola. It had
felt
as if there was someone behind those moonslit eyes. “Why didn't you notice it, then?” Deor asked. He could hear the anger in his own voice, but he couldn't keep it out.

“Of course I noticed it. I suspected it when we met, and confirmed it that first night, when I stood watch while you were all sleeping.”

“Why didn't you say anything?”

“I thought Liyurriu might be useful. Even an enemy can be useful, if you know him for what he is. And it was not clear that Liyurriu (or his puppeteer, rather) was an enemy.”

“Then Morlock was wrong.”

“I didn't say so. He doesn't trust people who lie to him; it's a fool who does. Liyurriu could have been sent by someone who wants the world to end, to wait until we were vulnerable, then turn on us and kill us.”

“Who would want that?”

“The people Morlock calls the Sunkillers.”

“Surely there are none in our world? That's why we are going to find theirs.”

“It's not sure at all, Deortheorn, if I may call you so.”

“
Harven
.”

“There
was
one in the world, our world. I'm pretty sure there was. The Balancer, the unbeing that lived in the Waste Lands. Did Aloê ever tell you about it?”

“I heard something about it,” Deor admitted.

“It had a relationship with the Two Powers. It was to keep them working, engaged in the destruction of the world. It was some plot of the Sunkillers, who lived in our world before the sun was born, and ached to return. That plot failed; this is another attempt, it would seem.”

Deor thought long about this. “So you think Liyurriu was sent by them, or one of them—by the Sunkillers?”

“No, I don't. I doubt one of them would trouble to learn the night speech of werewolves, for instance. But what if I were wrong? I was willing to take the risk; Morlock wasn't. A difference of opinion.”

“And of method.”

“Because he acted arrogantly and alone, without saying a word to anyone? So did I, you know. And he gave Liyurriu, or whoever was pulling Liyurriu's strings, a chance to speak up. Whoever they are, they should not have tried to bandy words with Morlock Ambrosius.”

There was an implied rebuke there, Deor decided. If the stranger behind the Liyurriu-mask should have not bandied words with Morlock, still less should his
harven
-kin, perhaps. And, if he was going to do it, he might as well do it to his kinsman's face.

He turned away from Ambrosia and his own thoughts and looked off
Viviana
's left bow . . . “port” they'd say on a sea ship, although he never understood why.

There was a glittering ice-forest there, running west as far as Deor could see. They were flying low enough now that he could see things moving among the crystalline leaves. Icy birds? Perhaps. He couldn't quite catch their shapes.

Ambrosia and Kelat continued to talk in low tones behind him. They were not saying much, but the way they were saying it made him wonder if they would be mating soon. He hoped they wouldn't do it in the
Viviana
. He never enjoyed witnessing the mating of the Other Ilk—it was so violent, so hard to distinguish from an act of hate.