The Wide World's End (47 page)

Kelat glared at him with hatred.

“But if you insist on leaving when the journey is at its most dangerous,” Morlock continued, “you must, of course, take your rations. If you find the courage to live, out among the snows, you'll need them.”

“Shut up!
Shut up!
”

Silence again.

“I'll kill you someday,” Kelat remarked in a conversational tone.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders, and there was no more talk of Kelat wandering off in the night to die.

They lay Kelat on his back. Ambrosia fed him a painkilling drug she had in her pack, and they arranged shears, bandages, snow, and herbs near at hand.

But when she lifted up the shears, her eyes grew wet again and she whispered, “Oh, Morlock. Oh, his beautiful face.”

Morlock was not attached to the young man's beautiful face and he didn't like the way his sister's hands were trembling. He took the shears from her. He put his left hand over Kelat's eyes, to restrain him physically and to keep him from flinching, and swiftly snipped off the gangrenous nose. Deor deftly caught it, and Ambrosia and Morlock busied themselves with sewing up the edges of the wound and bandaging it before Kelat lost too much blood.

“You've redleaf?” he asked her at one point.

“Yes. We'll have to give it to him to chew; we can't make tea.”

Then they were done. Kelat would have gotten up groggily, but they made him lie down again. “Rest!” said Ambrosia. “It's all any of us can do tonight.”

Kelat lay back down and saw Deor awkwardly holding the severed nose.

“Might need it,” Kelat said thickly, as if he had the worst cold in history. “Make soup out of it.”

Deor reflected briefly and then said deliberately, “Snot soup? I remember—”

Kelat gasped, then laughed, spraying blood out of his mouth and nose hole. “Sorry!” he said as the others cleaned him up. “Sorry!”

“My fault,” said Deor, not very sincerely to Morlock's eye.

“Snot soup,” Kelat whispered, and chuckled. He said no other word until morning.

The drug that Ambrosia had given him made Kelat sleep, but his sleep was restless and he kept waking and dozing all through the night. At no waking moment did he get the cruel relief of forgetfulness, the delusion that it had all been some terrible dream: it was always the pain in his face that woke him.

The next day he rinsed his mouth with melted snow, forced himself to eat a few bites of food, and then bound on his snowshoes and shuffled with the others along the narrow road northward. He wore his mask, of course. In fact, he had decided he would wear it, or something like it, for the rest of his life.

The pain was pain. He didn't relish it, but he could bear it. The shame of his stupidity—that would be with him for the rest of his life: every time he looked at a mirror; every time he chose not to look; every time someone looked at his face; every time they chose not to look.

The day was cold and searingly bright. He was so sick of the endless cold, the endless snow and ice. And now the shame, like vomit, filling his gorge. Maybe death was better than this.

But he would not be weaker than the others. Not again. Whatever burdens they bore, he would bear them, too. He would show them, and himself, that he could.

He found himself walking next to Morlock, with the others some distance ahead.

“I'll never forget what you said to me,” Kelat remarked quietly.

Morlock looked at him with those gray eyes, bright and cold as the horizon, and waited. There was a calm in him that nothing could touch. Kelat envied it and hated it.

“I'll always remember,” Kelat continued, “that you gave me something to live for, even if it was only hate.”

Morlock relaxed indefinably. “Well. I have natural gifts in that direction. So Ambrosia is always telling me.”

“And you're not worried about me acting on the hate?”

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. Kelat waited, but he didn't say anything more. They walked together in silence for a long while.

That afternoon, as the sun was eastering, Kelat was walking alone while Morlock and Ambrosia conversed in low voices ahead of him. He couldn't catch everything they were saying, but finally he heard Morlock say, in an annoyed tone, “People are born every day with faces worse than he has now.”

Ambrosia replied heatedly, “Those people are not the King of All the Vraids.”

“Is Kelat likely to be?” Morlock sounded surprised.

“Someone has to be. You can say it doesn't matter, that a civilized people wouldn't care what its leaders looked like. But the Vraids are, at best, semicivilized.”

“A civilized people doesn't have leaders,” Morlock replied.

Ambrosia laughed, taking it as a joke. Morlock did not laugh, and Kelat wondered why. She glanced back toward him and he didn't meet her eye, or give any sign he had heard them. He didn't want to betray any sign of weakness. He was painfully aware that this was itself a sign of weakness, but he couldn't help that. It was his only way forward, his only plan of action.

At dark they pitched camp, ate a few bites from their dwindling stocks of food. Then Morlock and Deor turned in while Ambrosia stayed up to keep watch in visionary rapture.

“You should sleep, too,” Ambrosia said to Kelat, who had made no move toward his sleeping cloak.

“You were going to teach me about the Sight,” he reminded her.

She almost spoke, stopped herself, looked at him (he was glaring though his mask), and nodded.

For some reason, he found it easier to focus on the spiritual exercises than before. And once he felt himself floating above his body: not cold, not in pain, not ashamed. He turned toward Ambrosia and saw her talic presence, like bright, fiery flowers. Behind her lay a shadow, still as death.

Then it was gone, and he was in his body again.

“That was extraordinary,” Ambrosia said, and seemed to mean it. “Rest now. Meditate on what you've learned, and even more what you've unlearned.”

He nodded and turned to wrap himself in his sleeping cloak.

Thus ended his first day as a noseless freak.

The end of the world seemed a world away. Morlock remembered seeing it from the gondola of the
Viviana
, but he didn't truly believe in it any more. It was just necessary to keep on walking and walking until they froze or starved or were killed by monsters. He remembered the reason why they were there. He remembered it the way he remembered being warm, or drunk, or the afterglow of sex. These were historical facts. But they had no relevance to his life now.

Loneliness was as much a part of this journey as the deadly cold and the hunger. Paradoxically, there was also a lack of solitude. They were always in each other's company, and they grew weary of each other's faces and voices. By mutual consent they started spending more time alone—leaving many paces between each other, the little company strung out on the long, narrow road.

Morlock's antidote through this time had been thoughts of Aloê Oaij. But by now all those thoughts were a little threadbare, and they did not keep the chill of loneliness out anymore. He felt as if she were talking to him constantly, but he couldn't understand what she was saying. That meant thoughts of her were laced with frustration as well as comfort. Then one morning he woke up and the words were gone. Her voice was gone. He could not remember exactly what her voice sounded like. That was a bad morning.

When they took breaks from walking, one or more of them would leave the road. Originally these were opportunities to relieve themselves—at least in Morlock's case. But eventually he started to leave the road just to be away from the others, to be free from the boredom that was as mindless and intense as rage.

There was little variety in the harsh, white landscape—even the hills were often shadowless, if the day was cloudy. But it was something slightly different. On the long, tedious trek north, even little reliefs were welcome—necessary.

One day, as Morlock walked around a small hill on the east side of the road, he was surprised by the sight and sound of something new. It was a kind of flower grown from ice. It was a little like a woodland tulip: seven petals surrounding an open face. It was about as high as his knee, and it was emitting a low, silvery tone, like a wind-chime in the chill, persistent breeze.

As he took a step closer, the tone changed, became deeper somehow.

That was interesting, and it had been so long since something interested him that he stepped still closer. Then the tone changed again. It was fascinating, and the sound was reminding him of something; he wasn't sure just what. He stepped closer and saw that a second glass flower was rising up from the snow to join the first. The tone it emitted was like and unlike the first. Together, they made a sound that was very pleasing, and increasingly familiar to him.

He took a step closer, and a third glassy flower rose from the ground to stand with the others.

The music was warmer now, as warm as a human breath in the icy air.

He stepped forward.

Now there was a crown of woodland tulips the color of glass, their faces toward him, singing a wordless song in a voice that he knew.

It was Aloê's voice; he recognized it now.

He recognized something else. The tulips lying on the ground had been concealing something: a sac of darkish fluid set into the snow. In the sack were floating half-melted (or half-digested) ice insects.

They had been drawn by the music, as he had been drawn. They had gotten too close, as he was getting too close. And they had been swallowed by something, some mouth beneath the snow crust. He thought he could feel the surface shifting slightly underneath his snowshoes as he stood there amazed.

He thought of stepping backwards instead of forwards. He thought about it for a long time. But he didn't do anything about it. The thought of stepping backward and losing the sound of Aloê's voice was inexpressibly painful to him. But that was only part of it. His legs were not under his control. They were numb, almost, but not with cold. What if the sound was vibrating the strings of his nerves and overmastering his ability to move? Had he been stung by something, and was he feeling the effects of the venom? Was this binding magic of a kind his talismans did not protect him from?

He managed to not go forward. But the truth was, he could not go back.

He thought of drawing his stabbing spear. But as soon as the thought entered his mind, there grew up an impassable gulf between intention and execution. Nor could he speak, to call Tyrfing to his hand.

So he stood there, bathed in the voice of his beloved wife, expecting death.

A howl broke the spell—a long, ululating, meaty howl from a wolvish throat. The ice flowers rippled like water. Some turned away in the direction of the howl; others stayed, gazing at Morlock. But the music, and the magic, was broken.

“Tyrfing!” shouted Morlock.

The deadly crystalline blade flew around the hill to his outstretched hand. He stepped forward and swung the blade like a scythe, mowing down the ice flowers. They shattered like glass and their voices fell silent. The howling, too, had ceased.

Morlock felt something moving under the snow and waited for the flower beast's mouth to appear. He was disappointed when it didn't. He stepped forward and slashed through the stomach sac, letting its dark fluids and half-dissolved contents flow into the surrounding snow. The movement under the snow stopped.

Morlock took three long steps back and turned to face the howler.

It was Liyurriu. The left side of his face was smashed flat, like a clay figure that someone had dropped on the floor while it was still wet and then stepped on. There was a definite list to his four-legged stance. But Morlock knew those ape hands and feet.

“Stay where you are,” he said to the werewolf. “The weapon in my hand can sever your life from your body, however they are bound together.”

The werewolf promptly sat and proceeded to gnaw a tangle from its curling, hair-like fur.