The Wolf Age (68 page)

Justice, baffled, ceased to manifest herself. When Morlock was sure of this, he lowered his sword and dismissed his vision.

-ghost-bitten god-licking brach-up of a bastard!" Ulugarriu was shrieking.

Morlock leaned on his sword like a staff. The effort had cost him much, too much. He felt his tunic settling from his left shoulder down to his side. His shoulder had become too insubstantial to hold the fabric up. And the area around his heart was numb, set for dissolution. In another day he would be dead, or a living ghost.

He snarled wordlessly at Ulugarriu, who seemed taken aback.

"At times I forget you're not a werewolf," they said. "But that's because you're so much like a werewolf."

He turned to leave.

"Wait!" Ulugarriu said. "Look at the visualization I've been simmering in my bowl of dreams. This will matter to you. I promise you it will."

They led him down the long workroom to the broad-rimmed bowl of dreams, in its own wooden stand near the door where Morlock had first entered.

"Look! "

Morlock looked. He saw the insectlike instrument of the Strange Gods, sprawling across the northern plain. It was black lined with red fire. The land beyond it was brown and dead.

"What does it do?" Morlock asked.

"Ah! You are interested! I call it the Ice-Binder. It seems to eat cold."

"Eh."

"Oh, ghost. Not that again."

"Cold is merely the absence of heat."

"That's what I used to think, and I still think it. But apparently, heat can also be treated as the absence of cold."

"Hm."

"How I shall miss your lively conversation when you're gone!"

Morlock knew that two contradictory scholia might sometimes be used to explain and account for the same phenomena, and he even knew some math to describe such situations, but he was not interested in augmenting Ulugarriu's already considerable powers, so he said nothing.

"So this thing will gradually make this area unlivable, is that it?"

"Yes, except for the gradually part. I've been holding it off for yearsusing various dodges. It acts like it's alive, but it doesn't really seem to be. It certainly doesn't think. So I've used phantom cold waves and other tricks to slow its progress. But now it's about to sweep over the city."

"How are we seeing this? This is not a vision."

"You don't tell, but you ask, ask, ask. All right; I don't mind. The Strange Gods don't have anything like your Sight, either, but they do have what they call visualization. They gather information throughout their sphere and use it to create understanding of things as they are, or were, or will be. Their minds are not limited by physical constraints; they can use the whole world to think in, or remember. I can't, but I found that I can gather information through mantic spells to create images of things-as-they-may-be."

"May be? Sounds uncertain."

"That's what you get when you look at anything, youngster: something that may be there."

Morlock tapped the rim of the bowl of dreams, sending ripples through the visualization. "This, itself, is interesting. But I still don't care what happens to Wuruyaaria."

"No? Look there! A band of warriors, led by the new First Singer, has come north to investigate the Ice-Binder. They're trapped on the hill there. They're fighting so that some of them can get out."

Morlock didn't even glance at the image. "They will die, or live. It makes no difference to me."

"No?" Ulugarriu's russet eyebrows lifted in wonder. "Well, I made a promise to you earlier. I'm not withdrawing it-what was that?"

"You tell me."

"They made some sort of hole in the Ice-Binder. Not enough to do any lasting harm, and now they're dead, as you say, but it's more than I've been able to do. If we could find out what they used-"

"I am dying, Ulugarriu. Even if I wanted to help you, I would be of no help to you."

"Yes, but you need not die. I could-we could. That would be the first matter of business, you see. I would take your word you would help me. Then I, of course, could help you."

"You can cure the ghost sickness."

"Well. In a word. Yes."

"Because you caused it."

"Well, I. May have. Unintentionally."

"What were your intentions?"

"To make you more pliable, of course. That was the whole purpose in getting you into the Vargulleion. That fathead Wurnafenglu said he could break anybody. But you wouldn't be broken. You wouldn't cooperate in any way. I admired you for that, still do, but it was inconvenient. The Strange Gods had sent you north on some mission that was disrupting all visualizations-even they were complaining about it, if you can believe it, selfcentered brachs. I thought if I could get you working for me, you know, things might be fine after all."

"You planted that spike in my head. And it was meant to do this. To do this to me." He waved his ghostly hand in Ulugarriu's alarmed face.

"No! Really, I mean that. The spike was just a precautionary measure. I had no idea it would be in that long, or that it would make you suffer so. I was glad to take it out, so glad. But I couldn't have you-have you. Sort of running around with your full Sight, seeing through things and me and things. I just couldn't. So after I took the spike out I. Well, I did something else, didn't I? I let you have some of your Sight, and you weren't insane anymore, though you will never be what I would consider wholly sane either. The ghost. The ghost illness. Well, that wasn't meant to happen. I think I know why it's happening, and I can stop it. If you'll promise to help me."

"Would Hlupnafenglu have gone the same way?"

"No. He had another problem. He couldn't stand his memories of being the Red Shadow. When I met him in Apetown he was going to kill himself. I experimented on him with the electrum spike. It did make him pliable and freed him from the burden of memories."

"And made him an idiot."

"A cheerful idiot is not to be despised, not by creatures like us, my friend. It was you who gave him his memories back. Without those, he might have been happy."

"Did you kill him?"

"He killed himself."

"That was how you made it look. You killed him."

"I'll swear to you on binding oaths, I did not kill him. As Liudhleeo, I persuaded him to leave me alone for a time, and then I planted the headless Liudhleeo-simulacrum, stole Tyrfing, and fled. He must have killed himself after he found the body. He bore a heavy burden of guilt, you know."

"No," Morlock said bitterly. "No, I didn't know."

He turned away.

Ulugarriu sighed. "Wait," they said to his back. "Ambrosius, listen. The way down to the underworld is easy. The dark door lies open night and day. But to retrace your steps and escape again to the upper air-for that you'll work. For that you'll suffer."

"Drop dead."

"You're nearer that than I am, old friend."

Morlock did not answer. His cloak and other gear were on the stool where he had first sat down to rest. He donned them, sheathed his sword, and walked out of Ulugarriu's house.

He passed swiftly through the asphodel fields, lest Ulugarriu try to talk to him through any of those masks, and was nearly running by the time he reached the shining bridge over the river of fire.

On the far side, the red unicorn had resumed its place at the bridgehead. Now it was pawing at something on the ground. Morlock could hardly see it in the glare from the bridge's light, but as he came closer he thought it was the dark splintered remains of the cold-light he had thrown away earlier.

He felt through the pockets in his cloak and shirt to see how many coldlights he had left. The unicorn looked up and saw him on the bridge. It casually moved aside to let him pass: apparently it only guarded against people trying to enter-if, in fact, that was what it had been doing before. Perhaps it had only wanted to destroy the hated light, and now it had.

Morlock sidled past the uninterested unicorn. He had a thought on how to get that horn.

Morlock found an upright stone a little under his height. He draped his cloak over the stone. Standing behind the stone and resting his head atop it, he inched his arm under the cloak and pulled a cold-light from one of its pockets. Holding it behind the cloak, he tapped it lightly against the stone to activate it.

At the sound, faint even to Morlock, the red unicorn became completely alert. It stared straight at Morlock with its slotted red eyes.

Morlock shifted his stance a little and pushed the light out from beyond the cloak.

The unicorn lowered its horn and charged, in a single silken motion. Through each odd writhing gallop, neither like a horse nor a goat, the long spiraling horn was aimed straight at the same point; it never wavered.

The impact of the unicorn shook the stone. The horn was buried deep in the rock, about where Morlock's heart would be, if the stone had been his torso.

And it was stuck. The unicorn planted its delicate cloven hooves and pushed against the rocky ground, but it could get very little purchase.

Morlock pocketed the cold-light as the unicorn watched him with frenzied gaping red eyes. He drew Tyrfing from the baldric over his decaying shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Swift One," Morlock said. "Need drives me." He struck at the base of the horn and cut it cleanly through, about a thumb's width above the brow.

The docked unicorn leapt back and stared bemusedly at Morlock. It looked at the stump of its horn sticking out of the stone and stepped back farther.

"I hope it will grow back," said Morlock, not supposing the unicorn understood him, or would care if it could. Resting Tyrfing against the stone's side, he drew the cold-light and tossed it as far and as fast as he could.

The unhorned unicorn followed the arc of the light with delighted angry eyes and immediately ran after it. Morlock had actually thrown it harder than he intended: the cold-light landed in the river of molten stone. The unicorn dove in after it and disappeared from sight. Presently it appeared again, spraying fire from its nose and mouth. When Morlock turned away, it was still diving about like a porpoise in the fiery river.

Morlock picked up Tyrfing and began to hew away at the top of the stone. If he could have used two hands, he would have. But eventually he had split the top of the stone and was holding the red horn of the unicorn in his hand. He tucked it away in his cloak and walked away from the river of fire.

He came to the place where he felt the impulse clouds swirling through the air like leaves in autumn. He lay down among the stones and the corpses and, holding tightly to Tyrfing as his focus, summoned the rapture of vision.

It did not come easily, but he was in no hurry this time. He focused and unfocused. He thought and he dreamed. He unwove his consciousness and in its place spun a vision as deep as his wounded powers could permit.

When he was deep in rapture, he began to draw impulse clouds to him. They flocked to him like birds to scattered grain, eager to be directed by a living will. When he was densely cocooned with the shadowy clouds, he directed them to lift him upward.

As he rose through the cone of the dead volcano, he saw much with his inward eye that had been hidden before. He saw a network of underground channels like dark rivers, leeching impulse clouds from the Well of Shadows. He saw the unlife of the fiery beast to the north and the thousand winters it carried in its cold veins. He saw the colonies of were-rats up and down the slopes of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. More were dead than alive: the cruel weather had been deadly for them, too.

The impulse clouds lifted him above the lip of the crater. It was night, and they began to disappear in the open air; they could not carry him much farther. He unbound them from his will and let them dissipate in the faint misty starlight.

He knew, rather than felt, that his body slid down the side of the volcano for a while until it came up against a tumble of stones. Carefully, as deliberately as he could, he rewove his conscious connection with his dying flesh. It took a long time, and he didn't have much time, but he was strangely unconcerned.

He had come looking for knowledge and for vengeance. He was leaving with knowledge and guilt-and a unicorn's horn. That added up to something very like hope.