CHAPTER SIX

The Narrow Road
to the Deep North

Their packs survived more or less intact. Morlock and Ambrosia had placed fire-quell magic on them, as they did out of habit with most things they wore, and the only losses were from the crash. In Morlock’s, for instance, the impact had shattered a jar of some horrible mushroom liquor he had received as a gift from the Blackthorn masters of making.

“Eh,” said Morlock. “I could have used a drink.”

“You drink too much, harven,” Deor said.

Morlock shrugged and turned away to harvest fabric and wood for snowshoes.

They each made their own snowshoes, even Kelat, who proved to be quite good at it.

“If you couldn’t make snowshoes and walk away,” he explained to Deor, “you were trapped all winter long with the other Uthars.”

“But it can’t snow so very much on the north shore of the Sea of Stones, where Uthartown is,” Deor objected.

“Uthartown is wherever the Uthars are. It must have had fifteen different locations that I can remember.”

“Sixteen since you were born,” Ambrosia interjected.

Deor’s eyes crossed at this and Morlock smiled to himself. Deor understood travel, and tolerated it fairly well, but the idea of a home that was not always in the same place: that was unthinkable to many a dwarf.

Morlock cut cloth from the shell of the Viviana and made it into face masks for each of them.

Ambrosia and Deor took theirs without comment, but Kelat objected. “I don’t like things on my face—I don’t care how cold it gets.”

“Your face cares,” Morlock retorted. “We are nearing the edge of the world, where men may not dwell.”

“Even Deor and I don’t like it much,” Ambrosia said. Kelat laughed, and did not put on his mask. The others did, though.

The track of the sunstream was easy to read on the moonslit face of the snowy plain, and they shuffled across the empty white fields to reach it.

The snow crust there was deeper and more stable. They pitched camp for the night.

“We should have brought firewood from the Viviana,” Kelat said.

“No fires on this trip,” Morlock said.

“What keeps us from freezing at night?”

“You will, Prince Uthar,” Ambrosia said. “You’re a furnace, burning fuel night and day. Did you know it? All we need do is contain the heat that you, and I, and the others here generate as a matter of course. Morlock or I can shepherd that heat, keeping it within a shelter, as we kept it in the balloons of the Viviana.”

Kelat looked relieved at this, but Deor gave a sidelong glance and said, “I don’t like it, harvenen. Long watches in the visionary realm are a burden you have already born to your harm. Kelat and I will go fetch some firewood.”

Ambrosia said flatly, “No. We can’t carry firewood enough to last us to the edge of the world, and we’re unlikely to find any on the road, unless you think you can make a bonfire out of ice-trees. This is the only way, Deortheorn,” she added in a gentler tone.

“There’s another way,” Deor said stubbornly. “Share your burden. Teach us how to do it.”

Morlock met Ambrosia’s eye. She nodded briskly. “The Sight is a treacherous gift for a ruler,” she said. “But harven Deor has a point.”

“I always have a point,” Deor admitted, “though I usually manage to stab myself with it.”

They set up their occlusion and ran a census on their food. It wasn’t much to reach the end of the world with, much less to walk all the way back.

Deor said to Kelat, whose face fell approximately one face-length when he saw how small the rations would be, “Well, look on the bright side. We may not have to walk back.”

“Because we’ll be dead, you mean?” Kelat said calmly. “That might be just as well. Starvation’s an ugly death.”

Morlock was impressed with the youth’s steadiness. He did childish things, like refuse to wear a face mask in the coldest air in the world. But he was not a child.

“If it comes to that,” Morlock said, “there are ways to survive without food.”

Deor stared at him. “Oh?”

“Yes. We might absorb the tal of the local beasts and plants directly. It would keep life in our bodies, anyway.”

“What’s the downside? I can tell by your face there’s a downside.”

“It may change our bodies.”

“Ach. Well, troubles never come singly.”

“And a stitch in time saves nine.”

“A stitch or nine is exactly what you’ll need when I’m done with you, harven,” Deor said mildly.

They each ate something and then Ambrosia and Kelat wrapped themselves in their sleeping cloaks and lay back to back. Deor stayed awake for a while and Morlock took him through the first lessons of the Sight. It did not go as badly as it might have, and Morlock was strangely moved to think that his harven-kin and oldest friend might become a dwarvish seer—a rare thing in the world, if not absolutely unheard of.

Morlock watched intermittently all through the night. The occlusion, in fact, trapped most of their heat, but he set a sentinel mannikin to wake him every few hours to make sure the shelter had not grown too cold.

When day came they struck camp without eating and began the long walk northward on the narrow road paved with ice and the sun’s death. The cleft of the road was always before them; their path ran a little below the level of the snow fields, and there was often drifting snow to contend with. The day was but little warmer than the night; the heat drawn away from the sun seemed mostly to stay aloft. Kelat rarely wore his face mask but Morlock didn’t warn him again; he was not the boy’s mother.

They walked, with a few breaks, until sunset. Then they made camp, ate a little, and Kelat and Ambrosia stayed up while Morlock and Deor turned in.

And that was how it went: day after day in the endless plain of snow and ice. The biggest difference most days was in who would hold the watch at night.

They talked some as they walked. But, in truth, a time came when they had said most of what they had to say to each other, and each walked with his or her own thoughts.

Morlock’s daydreams largely focused on Aloê. Rarely in their marriage had they been apart so long or so far. His longing for her was by now the principal concern of his waking life. It dwarfed hunger, thirst, cold, and fear. The hope of her, the golden warmth of the thought of her, kept him moving. The only way back to her was ahead. His long, regular strides were like the beat of a song, a song that had one word: Aloê . . . Aloê . . . Aloê. . . .

It was not all monotony, though. Occasionally, there were monsters.

One day they found they had passed from the flat, snowy plains to a bumpier region of snow-covered hills. The hills bristled with black-hearted ice trees. The bloodless sun above lit the hills with searing brightness. Morlock drew his mask over his eyes and stared down at the ground. So he wasn’t the first to see it.

“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said at his elbow. “One of those hills is moving.”

Morlock looked up and saw: a hill that stood just to the left of their path lurched up from the ground. They could see sky beneath it through three stumpy legs or roots that still touched the ground.

“Is it a plant?” wondered Deor. “Or . . . ?”

It pulled one of its legs loose from the ground. The leg looked oddly like one of the trees on the beast’s back: crystalline and spiky, veined with darkness.

A second leg came loose, and then the third.

Morlock remembered shapes he had not understood when seen from the air: vast hill-sized shapes moving through the snow. This. These, rather: they should assume that all the hills were the three-legged hulking beasts.

It took a step, and the ground shook. The step was toward them.

“Move,” said Ambrosia, but they were all moving already.

Now more hills were shaking, streams of snow flying off them in the wind like strands of white hair.

“Think they eat things like us?” Deor speculated.

“Does it matter, if they kill us first?” Kelat replied.

“It may to them. Think how disappointed they’ll be! ‘Oh, no! Dwarf-meat again!’”

“That what your mother used to say, you think?”

Deor glanced at Morlock, rolled his eyes, and laughed with (it seemed to Morlock) ostentatious politeness. Morlock decided he should tell Kelat about dwarvish family life so that he could make his banter more on point.

The hillbeast who had first awakened was moving faster now—as fast as they were, shuffling along on their snowshoes. It seemed to be picking up speed as it went, and now there were others bumbling along behind it. The hillbeasts on the eastern side of the road were trundling into motion also.

“Should we kick these shoes off?” Ambrosia, who was in the lead, called back.

Morlock had been thinking the same thing, but on impulse he shouted back, “No!” He waited a moment for his half-formed idea to emerge fully into being and then continued, “Slow start; slow stop.”

“Right!” Ambrosia called back after another moment. She leaped off the narrow road to the north and ran westward through the field of shuddering beasts.

“Deor! With her! Kelat, with me!” Morlock shouted. He leaped off the road, running eastward.

The cold—cruel enough on the snowy road carved by the sun’s death—bit deeper than ever in the snowy fields. Morlock was glad of his mask—wished for something better. He wondered if impulse wells could be adapted to turn impulses into heat. Hm. . . . If you put impulse collectors in the shoes. . . .

A hillbeast roared behind him. Once, in a very different land than this, Morlock had heard an elephant scream when it stepped on a poisoned stake. If a thousand elephants made of glass had stepped on four thousand poisoned stakes, it might have sounded something like the hillbeast’s rage.

“What are we doing?” Kelat wondered aloud, shuffling along beside him.

Morlock looked at Kelat, noticed something about his face, decided it wasn’t the time to mention it. “We’re sowing confusion,” he said, and jabbed a thumb over his lower shoulder.

Kelat spun about and gasped. He grabbed Morlock’s arm and Morlock halted, looking over his shoulder.

One of the hillbeasts pursuing them had blundered against a hillbeast that was just beginning to rouse itself. The hillbeast in motion staggered back and raised the long lip of its gigantic body, exposing the vast mouth between its spiny root-like legs. The mouth had no teeth, but it did display a long, snakelike, thorny tongue. It screamed its thousand-glass-elephants-in-agony scream and stabbed the offending hillbeast through its side with the long, indefinitely extensible tongue. Black matter spurted out of the wound, and the attacker rolled its tongue in and out of the wound, slurping up the clumpy black fluid, whatever it was. Now the offending hillbeast, offended, struggled to its rooty feet and stabbed its attacker with its own tongue.

The beasts about them were rising up also.

“Come,” said Morlock. “We’ll run until we have pursuers and double back—”

“I see!” shouted Kelat, evidently delighted, although his face didn’t change expression much.

They ran back and forth for much of the day, sowing chaos among the hillbeasts. Sometimes they caught sight of Ambrosia and Deor doing the same. But as the sun began eastering, Morlock led Kelat away northward through the fields, successfully avoiding the attention of the hillbeasts, who were mostly busy feeding on each other.

They saw Deor and Ambrosia running parallel to them on the far side of the road. As dusk rose, blue from the earth, into the sky, they met on the road and set up occlusions for shelter.

The others wanted to talk about the adventures of the day, but Morlock overrode them all, saying to Kelat, “Let’s have a look at your face.”

Startled, Kelat raised a gloved hand to his face. “What’s wrong with it? It doesn’t hurt.”

“Feel anything?” Morlock asked.

“Uh. . . . No.”

“It’s frostbite,” Ambrosia confirmed, looking at the hard, white skin that showed wherever his golden beard didn’t. “Oh, Uthar.”

“Sit down,” Morlock directed. “Take your gloves off and hold your hands over your face.”

Ambrosia sat next to him and closed her eyes. In moments she was in visionary rapture.

“It’s starting to feel better,” Kelat said.

Morlock didn’t doubt it. Ambrosia could herd the warmth from Kelat’s hands and his core to thaw his frozen flesh. But if the tissue was dead . . . dead was dead.

Morlock sat, shucked his pack, unpacked his food, ate his cursory meal in three bites, and then filled his belly with water, wishing it were wine.

“I’m going to be all right,” Kelat said tentatively. If it was a question, Morlock didn’t answer it. He put his food and waterbottle away and unfolded his sleeping cloak.

Ambrosia descended from vision. She opened her eyes, looked at Morlock, and shrugged.

Morlock tapped his nose, meaning, What about his nose?

Ambrosia shook her head. It was dead (or so Morlock guessed).

“We should take care of it now,” Morlock observed.

“You are sure of that,” she said.

He thought this remark over. Morlock was sure, and Ambrosia was likely sure as well. But Kelat would not be.

“What do you mean?” the young Vraid said. He was still obediently holding his hands over his face. If he had as obediently worn his face mask, he would not be facing mutilation now. On the other hand, if he were merely obedient, he wouldn’t be much use on a quest like this.

“Your face will be well enough, though it will have some bruising for a while,” Ambrosia said. “Your nose is in a more serious condition.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“We’ll know in a couple of days. You can lower your hands now.”

They talked even less than usual that night.

The next day, Kelat wore his face mask. Morlock and Deor talked over the idea of using impulse wells to heat clothing in winter. It was purely theoretical, since they had no impulse wells or the means to make them at hand, but it was a way to combat the perpetual gnawing chill, if only in imagination. It seemed to raise everyone’s spirits.

At the end of the next day they inspected Kelat’s face again. The bruising was horrific: blackish purple smeared across his face, darkest on the nose. The very end of his nose was a greenish gray: gangrene was beginning.

They showed it to him in a mirror and explained what it meant.

“Cut my nose off?” he said, obviously surprised at the thought of it. “Can’t you heal it? Surely you can heal it! I’ve seen the wonders you can do when you try.”

“The flesh is dead,” Ambrosia said with unwonted gentleness. “I’m sorry, Kelat. But dead is dead. It will have to come off.”

Kelat looked at each of them, as if he expected someone to disagree. He shouted, “No! No! I’d rather die.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Ambrosia said impatiently.

“You don’t know—”

“It’s you who don’t know, sir. That’s why you are in this uncomfortable position. But that’s all that it is—not a matter of life and death.”

“It is to me!”

“Kelat, my friend,” Morlock said. “There are things worth dying for. We all believe that, or we wouldn’t be here. But vanity isn’t one of them.”

“This isn’t vanity.”

“It is.”

Silence.

“Let me go away,” the young man said quietly. “Let me go away and die in the wilderness. You can keep my rations and have . . . have that much good from this mess.”

Ambrosia’s eyes filled with tears and she looked at Morlock.

“No,” he said pitilessly. “You have not yet been of much use on this quest, young Prince Uthar, but what use you could be you still can be. We didn’t bring you along to judge perfumes or the bouquets of fine vintages, you know.”

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.

The beloved voice of his sister fell unpleasantly on Morlock’s ear. “What in Chaos are you doing here, Morlock?” Nonetheless, he was glad she was here to act as interpreter. Deor and Kelat were at her side.

“Almost getting killed,” he said. “Watch out for singing flowers.”

“And why are you menacing the entity who, apparently, saved you with another kind of singing?”

“You know why.”

“What’s to be done, then?”

“I want Liyurriu here to tell us what he is and who sent him.”

“And if his answers don’t suit you . . . ?” began Ambrosia, with a dangerous tone in her voice.

But the werewolf was already ululating a long and, to Morlock’s untrained ear, rather repetitive reply. Ambrosia heard him through, sang a few howls herself, each one of which got a copious response from Liyurriu.

“First,” Ambrosia said at last in Wardic, “he says that he is sorry he didn’t trust you with the truth back in the airship.”

Morlock grunted. “I’m not interested in apologies.”

“He is. I’m giving you the barest summary.”

“Thanks.”

Ambrosia continued, “He is sent here, he says, by a lifemaker in the werewolf city. The maker—”

“What’s his name?”

Ambrosia uttered a kind of howl.

“That sounds just like his name,” Morlock said.

“No, no—they’re really quite different. Listen, I’ll sing it again more slowly—”

Morlock held up his free hand. “Never mind. We can go on thinking of him as Lurriulu—”

“Liyurriu.”

“—yes. I doubt that I’ll ever have the need to speak Werewolvish.”

“You never know, Morlock. Anyway, what would your Oldfather Tyr say to hear you dispraising the study of languages.”

“As a matter of fact,” Deor observed, “he was not fond of wolves.”

“So be it! Liyurriu was sent by this lifemaker to aid us. He’s worried about the end of the world, you see, as well he might be.”

“Eh. Wouldn’t a werewolf like it if the sun never rose?”

“I asked about that. Werewolves get cold, too, it seems. Also, no sunlight would be bad for the prey, he said.

“Us, in fact.”

“Yes. He admitted that, too, by the way. He’s being very candid, Morlock.”

“Understood.”

“He’ll help us if he can. If we tell him to go away, he’ll go away. If you wish to dismember him, feel free to do so; the body is only an avatar.”

“Eh. He may have a dozen more.”

“He said he has more, yes.”

“What do you think?”

“I think he could have let you die just now, and then come after us one by one on the road. I thought you were high-handed before, but your suspicions were reasonable, given what we knew then. Now we know more.”

“Another mouth to feed,” Kelat pointed out.

“Uh—Prince Uthar makes a good point—”

The werewolf sang.

“‘This avatar does not need food,’” Ambrosia translated. “Any other objections?”

Deor shook his head slowly. Morlock said, “No.” Kelat said nothing.

“Now we are five,” Ambrosia said happily. “It’ll be nice to have someone else to talk with. Let’s get going!”

Ambrosia came up with a novel method of varying the monotony of their companionship. There was no reason why they couldn’t establish two shelters every night rather than one, and they could vary the numbers in each shelter: two in one, three in the other, one in one, four in the other. They could roll dice or draw lots to decide how many shelters and who slept in each one. Conceivably they could even have five different shelters, although that might be putting undue stress on the seers who kept them alive each night.

It was amazing what only a night or two of these arbitrary separations did for their companionship. They talked more during the day. They resented each other less at night. Kelat already believed that Ambrosia was wiser than everyone else, but she was always outdoing herself in his estimation. He did not say anything about this, however, and his expression could not have betrayed him, as he wore his mask all the time now.

Until the third night of shelter switching, when the gods of chance or fate assigned Ambrosia and Kelat to the same two-person shelter. Morlock, in the other shelter, was seer for the night.

“Come, Prince Uthar,” she said briskly once they had eaten their meager meal. “Off with the mask and I’ll check your wound.”

“I’ve been taking care of it,” Kelat said sullenly.

“I’m not much of a healer, but I’m better than you are. You’ll concede that, I hope.”

“Yes.”

“Then: off with it.”

Kelat took his mask off, feeling more naked than if he’d taken off his breeches. She swiftly unbandaged his face and looked at his wound. “Good,” she said. “You have been taking care of it.”

“I don’t want to be—” He snapped his mouth shut.

“—any more of a nuisance that you’ve already been?” she guessed.

“Something like that.”

“On a long enough trip, everyone takes their turn at being a pain in the ass. Don’t let it worry you. Morlock was sort of an idiot about that glass flower, but you don’t see it bothering him.”

“I don’t see anything bothering him.”

“And you’d like to be like that? I suppose I understand. When I was young and foolish, I felt the same way. But in the intervening years, I discovered two things. One is that things bother Morlock more than he lets on. He just doesn’t show it the way we do because he wasn’t raised by men and women. The other thing was: I’d rather be me than anyone else in all the worlds.”

“Of course,” he breathed. It was a confession of his adoration. He knew it, only after he had spoken, and she knew it, too, he thought. Her radiant gray eyes fixed on his and she smiled. He reached reflexively for his mask, but she reached it first with her long, clever fingers and tossed it across the shelter.

“If you touch that thing again tonight,” she said, smiling angrily, “I’ll strip your clothes off and toss your bare ass out into the snow.”

“I don’t want you to have to look at the hole in my face,” he said, turning away from her. “My beautiful face,” he added bitterly.

She took him by the chin and turned that face toward her again. “I’m older than you are,” she said, “and I know that something can be broken and still be beautiful.”

“Like me.”

“Like your face. You are not broken. I’ve seen you struggling with this, becoming a man under the weight of it and . . . and other things. But yes. I still find your face beautiful.”

She kissed the wound where his nose had been. He felt with horror her soft, firm lips on the ragged, seeping edges of his wound. He was shocked to the core, and without thinking he pushed her violently away. She landed on her elbows next to his discarded mask, her eyes wider and more luminous than ever and a crazy, terrifying grin on her face.

“That’s the way you want to play it, eh?” she said.

She launched herself with her elbows and landed on top of him. He tried to hold her away from him, but she was so strong. . . . Plus, she cheated by tickling him where his leg met his hip, which never failed to make him convulse (although he had no idea how she knew that). She rewarded herself with a long, wet kiss (on his mouth this time, thank the Strange Gods), and he could not even try to hold her away any longer.

“I’m not worthy of you,” he whispered in her ear.

She laughed wickedly and the sound stabbed him with pleasure. “That’s not your problem, Uthar. The only thing you have to decide is whether you want to fuck me.”

“Always have,” he whispered.

“Then get your damn clothes off. No, never mind!” Her left hand danced across the fastenings for his clothing while her right hand did the same for hers. In seconds they were rolling around unclothed on the floor of the shelter and he was exulting in the sacred, unspeakable beauty of her nakedness: rosy ivory skin shading to golden brown on her arms and face, iron muscles moving under her sheath of female softness, mouth wet on his, tongue searching desperately for his, then he was on her, ungracefully, eagerly, and she guided him with her clever hands, and her pubic hair scratched along the shaft of his penis as he sank into her, and she was hot and wet, hotter than the dying sun, wetter than the sea.

The world was silent. There was no sound anywhere.

Uthar moved his hips as far back as he dared; he felt he would die if his penis didn’t stay inside her vulva. Then he rode that silken slide of ecstasy down to its end again, and one more time, and then his body was shaken by a storm of orgasm. It was pleasure enough to unhinge the mind, yes, and it was a relief, yes, and it hurt. It hurt the way it hurts when you’ve been carrying something for too long, so long you’ve almost forgotten what it was like before you were carrying it, and then you set it down, and it’s wonderful to be free of it, and only then are your muscles free to feel pain.

He lay atop her, gasping out words of love and worship, and the world wasn’t silent anymore.

He heard his beloved’s voice as if from far away, through the golden fog of carnal ecstasy: “Well. That wasn’t so bad. How soon can you go again?”

It was a long night, and yet too short.

In morning’s blank, ugly light her beauty was still sacred, transcendent, superbly practical. She set about the tasks of the morning as if they had sex every night.

As the others were still disestablishing the occlusion over their shelter, and somewhat out of earshot, he said to her, “If—”

She said, “I’ll tell you when I’m done with you.”

And that was what he had to hold onto that day. She was not done with him. She had never, in the course of the entire night, said that she loved him. And of course, love had little to do with her choice of a life-mate. And would a demimortal like her condescend to be the life-mate of a wholly mortal man whose life was so much shorter than hers?

The worst possible way to look at it was this: she was mating with him because, nosed or noseless, he was the only eligible man for thousands of miles. This was all the more possible, since he’d heard her remark to Morlock something about “my brother, a dwarf, and a meat-puppet that looks like a werewolf.” Kelat wasn’t any of these things; hence, last night—and tonight, possibly, and perhaps an indefinite number of nights. Then nothing, when she had a longer list to choose from.

It was worth it, he decided. He’d have given up a thousand noses to have what he had with her now, however long it lasted.

The random assignments of shelter mates continued. When Kelat and Ambrosia had a shelter to themselves, they coupled like murkles in heat. Otherwise, they were companions on the road, no different than the others. Kelat assumed that the others knew, but nevertheless no one ever referred to it, giving the affair a pleasing quality of sneakiness and privacy.

One day, Kelat was concerning himself with numbers (the bites of food left in his disturbingly light pack; the odds that he and Ambrosia would pair off tonight), when he saw a piece of ice falling from the sky.

The weather had been as monotonous as the road north: clear and cold. He wondered if this was the first blast of an ice storm . . . but the sky was cloudless; the silver sun glittered on the ice, almost an arch, or a. . . . There were scales or something on the arch. . . .

Liyurriu snarled and ran forward, but it was too late: the gigantic ice-dragon’s tail slammed down and trapped the Ambrosii and Deor beneath it.

The werewolf ran on. Kelat threw off his pack and ran after him, drawing his spear as he went.

The ice dragon’s gigantic wolflike head slithered into view. It was almost impossible to see its glassy outlines against the white snow. But Kelat could see hollow fangs that dripped with something like venom. . . .

Liyurriu had closed with the dragon’s head and seemed to fly up into the air. Then Kelat realized the werewolf was climbing something—some feathering, or icy plates on the side of the serpentine head.

He kicked off his snowshoes and leaped for the same—hoping it was there rather than actually seeing it. He landed a foot or two off the ground, sliding across a piece of nearly invisible ice, leaving scars from his cleated boots. He jumped at the next feather, and the next, until he was beside Liyurriu in the back of the thing’s gleaming, surprisingly narrow neck.

It was ware of them, and the head began to twist around. That was good because it was turning away from their companions, still trapped under the tail. It was also bad because they nearly fell off. Liyurriu and Kelat both grabbed for the nearest dorsal plate and managed to hang on.

The werewolf put his misshapen jaws to the back of the glassy neck and gnawed at it.

Kelat saw his purpose. Break through the scaly skin—sever the spine. If it was like dragons of a more familiar kind, that might kill it.

A jet of translucent shining ichor sprayed out of the dragon. Liyurriu tried to dodge aside but could not. The jet fell across his foreleg and it shattered like glass. Liyurriu fell silently away, and the task was left to Kelat.

He could see no other method than Liyurriu’s, nor did he expect any different fate than Liyurriu’s. That didn’t bother him. It was wonderful, after a lifetime of being a spare part that no one would ever want, to know his purpose in life: he was born to love Ambrosia, and to die defending her.

What did worry him was the thought that he might fail. He must not fail.

He stabbed with his spear deep into the ice-dragon’s neck, dancing away from the jet of freezing ichor and steam that sprayed out. Then he did it again and again. The jets were smaller, easier to avoid, flowing through the several holes he had made. He cut a channel between them, and the deadly muck flowed away thickly down the side of the beast.

There was a strange weightless sensation, as if he were flying. Then he saw that he was: the dragon’s head was in midair. The beast was lifting itself up, perhaps to crash its head down and shake him loose. If so, he had moments, perhaps only a moment.

He stabbed into the glassy trench he had made, as near the center of the neck as he could tell, as deep as he could drive the spear’s blade. And he struck! He struck something.

His hands, drenched in ichor, were numb and void of feeling. But they still gripped the shaft of his spear. He drew it out and stabbed again and again and again. The dragon’s head struck the snowy ground and the shock threw him off it.

He tried to get to his feet, but his body would not respond. He saw that the spear-shaft in his hand was broken a handsbreadth below where his hands still gripped it.

He craned his neck to look at the ice-dragon. It was lying near at hand in a steaming pool of its own glassy ichor. Its eyes were open, filled with rainbows in the sun’s pale light. But it wasn’t moving. He guessed it was dead.

Ambrosia came running up to him.

“You stupid son-of-a-whore!” she screamed. “I’ll kill your stupid, noseless face!”

That was when he knew that she loved him. It was terrible to lose her, and the world that was suddenly his, in that moment. But the knowledge was something he could carry with him into the darkness, and he hugged it close to him as his awareness ebbed away.

When Morlock dragged himself out from beneath the dead ice-dragon, he heard Ambrosia screaming and got up to run toward her. But he was stopped by the sight of Liyurriu’s body, shattered like a clay figurine, past all repairing.

Its eyes were open, though, and they were on Morlock.

“Shall I sever your life?” he asked, drawing his deadly dark sword.

“You forget,” said a voice, speaking flawless Wardic through Liyurriu’s unmoving jaws, “that this body is not truly alive. It will be no more use to you and yours, Ambrosius, and I plan to abandon it.”

“Then.”

“Good luck at the end of the world, Ambrosius. I will know you if we meet again. But you won’t know me.” The voice laughed a little through the werewolf’s deformed, unmoving jaws. Then the wolvish eyes closed and Liyurriu was silent forever.

Morlock looked about and saw that Deor was already with Ambrosia by Kelat’s fallen body. He strode over and said, “Dead?”

“No,” Ambrosia said tonelessly. The focus-jewel hanging from her neck was glowing, as were her closed eyes. “Help me.”

Kelat’s hands and forearms were bone-white with frost, as was his left leg. There was no doubt what help Ambrosia wanted: she must be concentrating the heat in his body on those frozen areas, thawing them out before they died.

He lay down in the snow and summoned deep vision as fast as he was able. If Kelat could be saved, time was their enemy.

Kelat awoke to the cheery light of a fire flickering on the shelter walls.

That was odd. But it was pleasing. He thought he would never see fire again. He thought he would never see anything again.

He tested his hands. They ached unbearably, but he could move them. His leg, too.

“Oh, you’ll live to fight another dragon someday, if that’s what you’re worrying about, Prince Uthar,” he heard Deor remark.

Kelat lifted his head. “Name’s Kelat.”

“Yes, but Ambrosia suggested we start calling you Uthar instead. It’s all those other Uthars who’ll have to change their names, from the sound of things.”

Kelat considered this in silence. It seemed rather momentous, but in a distant way. Being alive—and not seeing his arms and leg go the way of his nose—all that seemed more important, was certainly more immediate.

Morlock and Ambrosia were lying still on opposite sides of the fire. Their eyes were not lit up with vision. They were just sleeping.

Kelat gestured at the fire. “What . . . ? What . . . ?”

“My pack,” Deor said. “It was almost empty anyway, so I’ll distribute what’s left among the other three. The seers are out, as you see, and we have to get through the night somehow. I had some fun designing the occlusion so that the smoke departs but most of the heat remains—but I suppose you don’t care about that.”

“Keeps me alive. I care.”

“Some food will help, too. I was all for making werewolf sausages out of that dead meat-puppet, but Morlock seemed to think the meat might not be healthy.”

“Ugh.”

“Well, that was what he actually said. I take it you agree. You want a mouthful of flatbread and dried meat? It’s what we’ve got, so that’s kind of a rhetorical question.”

“Water more.”

Deor unfolded a flatware bowl and got him some melted snow.

“We’re going to make it, I think,” Deor said to him while he drank. “I didn’t think so before.”

“Make it a while longer,” said Kelat. He tried to think of himself as Uthar. He was still thinking about it when he fell asleep.

They did make it.

One pale, unremarkable morning they ate the last crumbs of their food and struck their shelters. They trudged up a steep ridge and, at the top, looked all the way down to forever: the wintry sky of that harsh summer faded to a misty blue like evening below. The land ran raggedly up to the edge of the sky and stopped. At the very end of the world, the winds from beyond the edge had scoured the stone free of snow.

But they no longer needed the track of the sun’s death in the snow to lead them. There, on the blue-black stone at the ragged edge of the world was a bridgehead. Beyond it a bridge extended in a long, curving arch beyond the eye’s ability to follow: paving stones black and white gave way at some indefinable point to patches of light and darkness.

“The Soul Bridge,” Ambrosia remarked.

Morlock nodded. There was nothing else it could be: the bridge the Sunkillers had made to invade the world, the way Skellar had been sent beyond the sky by Rulgân.

They saw no one there at or near the bridge, but their enemies were not material entities. Morlock kicked off his much-repaired snowshoes and drew Tyrfing, which was also not a material entity (or at least not merely material). He strode down the far side of the ridge and walked up to the bridgehead, Ambrosia at his side, the others close behind.

As he got closer, he did see someone or something: a vaguely manlike body, half-buried in snow, sprawled next to the bridgehead.

“Skellar,” he called over his shoulder.

Ambrosia grabbed Morlock by the elbow. He turned to look at her. She was in rapture, eyes closed and faintly glowing, the focus-amulet at her throat throbbing with pulses of light.

The light faded. She opened her eyes.

“Then?” he said.

“The body is not dead, but neither is it the residence of a soul any longer. There is nothing else alive between here and the edge of the sky except us—and except that.” She pointed at the Soul Bridge.

He grunted. “Alive?”

“It is tal interwoven with matter, like your blade Tyrfing there. Or, for that matter, like you.”

“Odd, but not unexpected. What’s troubling you?”

“That.” She pointed at something on the first step of the bridgehead: sheets of crystal, pinned with something like ice to the stone. There was dark writing on the crystal in a language that he knew, by a hand that he recognized.

It was a letter. And it was addressed to him.