CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The God and His Enemies

“Are you enemies of the God?” the Gray Folk asked, their red eyes twitching with anger.

Deor waited for Morlock to say something, but he was sort of twitching himself. So the dwarf got up and said, “Ruthenen! I am Deor syr Theorn, Thain to the Graith of Guardians and cousin to the Eldest of the Seven Clans under Thrymhaiam. I greet you.”

“We do not ask who you are, we ask: who are you? Are you enemies of the God, or not?”

Either the truth or a lie seemed equally likely to get them killed. Deor decided he would rather be killed for the truth. “We are not enemies of your God, but neither are we friends. He’s no god of ours.”

“It is enough,” the leader decided. “Excantors, disarm them and keep them safe.”

“Let it happen,” Ambrosia suggested in Wardic, and Deor nodded. Kelat seemed inclined to follow Ambrosia’s lead, no matter what the situation and Morlock—there was something wrong with him. He was in no state to be making decisions.

Some of the Gray Folk picked up their packs and weapons; the others surrounded them.

“Begin!” said the leader.

The excantors sang. It was a harsh, deep music, but not unharmonious. If there were words in it, they were in a language Deor did not know. The excantors began to march, and the four companions perforce marched with them—south and east, into the burning heart of Grarby.

They came to a jail. It was crowded with Gray Folk who jeered as the excantors chanted their way down the narrow stone hallway. There was a cell at the end; it was occupied by Gray Folk in kilts. These were hustled out of the cell and stuffed one at a time into other already-overcrowded cells.

“We must leave you here,” the leader of the excantors said apologetically to Deor, “but we will return with food and other comforts. May the God not be with you.”

“Uh,” said Deor, driven to Morlockian levels of terseness by confusion. Were they guests or prisoners? What were the Gray Folk fighting about?

He put these questions to Kelat, but the young Vraid was as bemused as he was. “It was not like this when I was here before. The town was very quiet. I never saw a fight, much less a war.”

Morlock was sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees, his luminous gray eyes fixed on something that was not present. Deor sat down beside him and said, “Morlock. . . .”

“It was so hungry,” Morlock said. “So hungry. In so much pain. It could never eat enough to dull the pain. The pain frightened it. The dark frightened it. It was meant to have eyes but didn’t any longer. It didn’t notice the cold but it was always cold. I noticed. I noticed the cold. Then it died and it didn’t want to die. But it died and died, and it keeps on dying.”

“That damn sword,” Ambrosia said. “He told me something about it. It’s dangerous to kill with the thing.”

“If—” Kelat began.

“Shut up. Deor, let him be for a while. If need be, I’ll go into rapport with him and try to bring him out of it. But the fact that he’s talking is actually a pretty good sign, as these things go.”

There was a key rattling in the lock of the cell. Ambrosia, Kelat, and Deor turned toward the door as it opened; Morlock didn’t seem to notice.

The leader of the excantors was there. He spoke to Ambrosia, “Lady, are you Ambrosia Viviana?”

“I am.”

“The Olvinar would like to speak with you.”

“Hypage opisô mou,” hissed Morlock.

Deor thought he was muttering gibberish, but Ambrosia looked startled, then laughed. “I’ll be careful, ruthen. Look after the children for me.”

She left the cell with the excantor, who locked the door and silently led her away.

Halfway up the long hall, Ambrosia said, “Why aren’t you chanting, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The mandrake shrugged scaly shoulders as crooked as her own and said, “It agitates the godstruck. And . . . I don’t think it really does any good.”

“Oh. What good is it supposed to do?”

“Keep God out of your head.”

“Is he often, um, in there?”

“Wouldn’t be much of a god if he wasn’t, would he?”

“I couldn’t say. Which god is he again?”

“There’s only one God!” said the excantor reflexively. “And he, uh, doesn’t exist,” he added lamely.

Theology was never a strong subject with Ambrosia, so she didn’t inquire further along these lines. There were more immediate questions, like: “Who is this Olvinar, then? I take it he exists.”

“Of course he exists. He would like to speak with you.”

“Well, then.”

The mandrake looked askance at her with blood-red eyes and then said grudgingly, “I must seem to you to be gibbering.”

“No,” said Ambrosia, lying with practiced ease. “But,” she added, because the best lies serve as gilt for the truth, “I don’t really understand what is happening here.”

“I will tell you the tale as I understand it while we walk.”

“It would be a kindness, ruthen.”

He looked at her again, more directly this time, and said. “Then. In the old time, there was one of us, we know not his name, he defied the calling of his blood and did not become a dragon. He learned of the Little Cousins under Thrymhaiam and the Blackthorns, and he thought he would create a religion to teach the Gray Folk to fight their blood—to not surrender to the evil within them. He was our lawgiver, our temple builder. But the temple was empty, for who—what god would be the perfect being who would inspire us to be perfect?

“Then the God actually appeared?”

“He appeared, and he was evil in our eyes and stank in our snouts. Many were lost to the dragon plague then. But a new teacher arose. He taught that this was an avatar of the God, sent to show us how not to be, how not to live. His imperfection was our guide to perfection.”

“Hm.”

“Well, it stopped the plague. We could live, together, as ourselves, and that was something.”

“And then . . . ?”

“And then came the Olvinar, the Adversary, the one called Lightbringer. He came to free us. He taught us that if we managed to kill the God, we would truly be free. It was a great word, and many received it gladly.”

“But not all.”

“No. Many still cling to the old foolish ways. And so we are at war with ourselves. The city burns, and we cannot cooperate to put out the fire. And the sun is dying, and some say it is because of the war against the God.”

Ambrosia put her hand on the excantor’s gray-plated forearm and said, “If I tried to escape, you wouldn’t try very hard to stop me, would you?”

“I would not try at all,” the mandrake said candidly. “I am . . . sick of it. Sick of all this.” After a pause he whispered, “When the Adversary . . . when he sends us out to fight our ruthen kin . . . I enjoy it too much. Sometimes I . . . feel a cold thirst in my throat that I would quench with hot blood. I dream blasphemous dreams of chewing the sacred flesh of my kin . . . breaking their bones . . . licking out the burning marrow with a long forked tongue. I can’t. . . . This can’t go on forever. It has gone on too long. Perhaps the world really must end. Perhaps I would welcome it.”

“Well, I’ll go with you and talk to the Olvinar, this anti-God. Perhaps we can sort out a less permanent solution for this mess.”

He nodded, clamped his long jaws hungrily a few times, and did not speak.

The Adversary lived in a house on the north side of town. It looked like a coil of great cable, wrapped around and around several storeys high, with a protrusion like a tower at the top.

There were two excantors chanting quietly at the front door. They held up their swords to salute their senior, then opened the door and stood aside.

“Go in, if you will,” her companion said. “He would like to speak to you alone.”

Ambrosia entered the dark doorway and heard the door closed and locked behind her. Protecting the Adversary? Imprisoning him?

The ground floor of the house was one big room interrupted by support columns. The stairway to the upper floors was exposed against the far wall.

The room was lit only in the center, where a white light-globe floated in midair. Beneath it, an old man sat at a table piled with books, light gleaming on his white hair and beard as he pored over a curious volume bound in brass.

The Adversary raised his head and looked at her with luminous blue eyes.

“Good evening, father,” said Ambrosia.

“Ah! Ambrosia my dear, my very dear!” Merlin Ambrosius leapt up and ran over to greet his favorite daughter.

“Ὓπαγε ὀπίσω μου, Σατανᾶ!” she said, holding out both her hands to reject his embrace. Get behind me, Adversary! it meant in one of the unspoken languages from her mother’s world.

“What . . . ? Ah! Ah hahahaha!” He laughed for some time rather theatrically and then said, “Very good, my dear. A most amusing reference to that somewhat obscure literary classic. That’s one reason I enjoy talking to you, my dear: your suppleness of mind. Your brother would be sadly incapable of appreciating such a jest, even if he were well-read enough to make it.”

Ambrosia forbore to point out that she was not joking and that Morlock had quoted that very text to her less than an hour before. She said instead, “Why are you here, father? I take it you are the great Adversary of the local god.”

“Yes, yes, they flatter me with that noble title. You know the secret name of this god, perhaps?”

“Morlock says he is Rulgân Silverfoot, also called the Kinslayer.”

“Yes, indeed—although what point there is in calling a dragon ‘kinslayer’ is beyond my telling. It’s like saying, ‘the one with wings—you know, the one who breathes fire.’”

“Hm.”

“But, more to the point, what brings you here, my dear? I gather you didn’t expect to find me here.”

“Not until I saw that vile fish you made.”

“Oh! Oh. You spotted that as one of mine, did you? How?”

“The thing was vicious, ugly, and a patchwork of scars. The maker makes in his own image.”

“Oh, come now. I have very few scars.”

“It was also in dreadful pain. So Morlock says.”

“The pain of a fish. These are the trivia that your brother concerns himself with, my dear.”

“He was concerned with saving me and my companions.”

“Oh! Your companions, yes, I admit, I have little interest in them. But my emissary would not have killed you. Your blood would have poisoned him, among other things. No, I wanted you to come here, and here you are.”

“But you can’t have expected me. You came here originally for some other reason.”

“And so did you, but you haven’t told me either, you know. We can dance around and around the point and never come to it.”

“We think Rulgân knows something about these entities that are killing the sun.”

Merlin’s eyebrows rose in polite surprise. “Only that? Really?”

“It seems somewhat important to us.”

“I can’t understand why. This world is doomed. But there are others. You were always fairly good at mathematics, and I understand even Morlock eventually learned enough to plot a course across the Sea of Worlds.”

“That’s your plan, then?”

“Eventually. It can’t really come too soon, to my way of thinking. This world is becoming so unfriendly, what with all the cannibalism and warfare because of the crops failing year after year. And the winters lately. My dear, you have no idea how uncomfortable cold can be as one gets a little older. It’s been a thousand years since I could properly enjoy a snowfall without thinking: My joints! That old wound in my chest! My sinuses! God Creator, my sinuses.”

“Then why don’t you abandon the sinking ship of this universe and swim away to sunnier climes?”

“I quite understand and resent your rodental metaphor, my dear, but the fact is that my business here is not quite finished, and I hate to leave a thing as important as this unfinished.”

“If ‘this,’ whatever it is, doesn’t impede my own plans too much, I might be inclined to help you with it. Morlock would feel the same way, I’m sure.”

“Him!” Merlin shook his head. “No—the boy is soft as rancid butter. We never should have let those dwarves near him. Besides, he knows little or nothing of lifemaking, and that is what my business entails.”

“In that case, I won’t be of much help, either. It’s not one of my arts.”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong, my dear; I’m sure you’ll be invaluable. Won’t you help me, please? And then, I give you my word, I will assist in your little quest. If you can save this world, I would be well pleased—I have nothing against it, really.”

Ambrosia hesitated. Nothing was more dangerous than Merlin when he seemed plausible.

“Well,” she said, reluctant to commit herself, “what is it, exactly?”

“It’ll be easier to show you than to explain. Won’t you come up to my workroom?”

They went together to the stairway. Merlin went to some effort to make himself agreeable, asking after her sister and how her experiment with the Vraids was working out, and other matters that he probably didn’t care about at all.

The stairs and floorboards were made of wood, but the walls were not. It was as if the interior of the house was built to stand independently inside an already existing structure. The outer walls were like gigantic cables laid over each other. They were hard as stone, cold and somewhat oily to the touch, and their surfaces were scaled.

“First fish-beast—now snake-beast?” she speculated. But Merlin was rattling away about something and didn’t seem to hear her.

The second floor was broken into a number of rooms joined by open arches. In the room where the stairway ascended, there was nothing but a three-legged table, about waist high. On it stood a fabric tent, something like a tea-cozy, but much larger.

“What’s that?” asked Ambrosia.

“Ah!” said Merlin delightedly. “That is the task at hand! Let me show you.” And he undid some fastenings and pulled the tent aside.

Standing on the table was a sort of egg made out of crystal. Inside the crystal were woman-shaped shadows, and a lurking flame, and a brain floating in the midst of it. Still attached to the brain by the optic nerve was a pair of eyes, bright gray like Morlock’s. They searched around the room and fixed on Ambrosia in something like recognition.

“You remember your mother, my dear?” said Merlin pleasantly. “Though perhaps you haven’t seen her lately.”

Ambrosia would have fled back down the stairs, but they were gone. Snakelike arms unfolded from the walls and held her fast.

“She’s getting very old,” Merlin said apologetically. “Her people were exiled from the Wardlands so long ago, you see, and of course they interbred with the peoples they found themselves among. Well, before your mother reached sixty, less than sixty years old, mind you, she was really quite decrepit. I’ve tried many ways to extend her life without damaging her selfhood. My thought coming here was to implant her brain and the rest of her awareness in Rulgân’s body. For various technical reasons, involving your brother and that gem he managed to implant in the beast, I have reason to believe the graft would be successful.

“But I could never get at Rulgân, you see. I bribed him with little favors—a gem that would transmit his awareness, and a spell to smash the Wards over the Gap of Lone, and a tribe of lifestealers to distract the Graith from his messenger. But Rulgân would never admit me into his presence, although he was weak enough to let me settle in this town. And he was aware of my intent at the last, and he raised up his believers against me. I’ve tried to fight them with a legion of unbelievers, but with a striking lack of permanent success. And it’s getting late, and the world is dying, and I’m not sure I could do this type of lifemaking in another world where the laws of nature are different.

“And here you came—a gift from God Creator, if I believed in any such ridiculous myth. I think your body will sustain your mother’s life for some centuries to come. Of course, that does mean we will be deprived of your charming company more or less forever. But I’m sure that’s a sacrifice you’d be willing to make, if you could be brought to understand what it means to me and, of course, for your mother.”

His blue eyes, colder than a winter’s sky, were on her as he spoke. She had known him all her life. He had raised her and her sister until she had run away from home. She knew how he talked, and she could translate what he said into what he meant.

What he meant was, I am going to core you like an apple and put this thing inside your corpse. And there is nothing you can do about it.