Morlock Ambrosius never said a word if none would do, so he simply nodded and stepped forward. Naevros stood back and leaned on his sword, breathing heavily, trying to settle his mind, hoping his fear hadn’t shown in his face.
When his breathing slowed to near normal, he said, “We’ll call it a draw, I think. If I ever want to kill you, I guess I’ll have to sneak up behind you with a rock or something.”
“Eh,” Morlock replied. “Do you want to kill me?”
“‘If,’ I said. I said, ‘If.’”
“That’s why I asked.”
“All right, then. Since you ask. I thought about it for a long time. Are you surprised?”
“No. I once thought about killing you, too.”
Naevros turned and looked straight at his opponent, colleague, and friend. “Did you really, you sneaky son-of-a-thrept? May I ask why?”
“I envied your closeness to Aloê,” the crooked man said, naming his wife and Naevros’ one-time thain-attendant.
Naevros found he was blushing. He exhaled completely, inhaled, exhaled, and finally he laughed. “I hadn’t realized you knew about it.”
“Everyone knows.”
“Not everyone knows it’s an intimacy that rivals your marriage.”
For a moment Naevros was afraid Morlock would say It doesn’t in that flat unemphatic way of his that somehow managed to roar in the ears like thunder. And then Naevros would really have to kill him.
Morlock shrugged, and Naevros wondered briefly if that was reason enough to kill him, too. But then Morlock lifted his accursed blade and said, “This was the wrong tool for the job, anyway.”
Tool? Job? Naevros stared at Morlock’s impassive face and wondered if there was some phallic innuendo in play. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“If I cut your throat,” said the ice-eyed man, “I might as well cut my own. That’s no way to reach her heart. She loves you too much—is loyal to those she loves.”
“I see. You couldn’t afford to kill me.” It was interesting to see how much his rival’s thinking had mirrored his own. “So you befriended me instead,” Naevros said speculatively.
Morlock turned away. “No,” he said, with his face averted. “That was always there.”
“How do you mean?”
“You accepted me when few would accept me—trusted me when almost no one trusted me. You saw me as myself, not just my ruthen-father’s son. That . . . matters to me. Will always matter.”
Naevros had mostly done it to irritate Noreê. But, to be fair to himself, he had seen something in that surly young Morlock, something others were disposed to overlook or throw away. Over the past century, he often wished that Noreê had succeeded in her attempt to snap baby Morlock’s neck. But if she had, he would have missed many an evening of drunken conversation, many an afternoon of brilliant fencing. That would have been a loss, no matter what else might have been gained.
Rather than say any of that, Naevros clapped his free hand on the higher of Morlock’s shoulders and said, “Well, I’ll walk you home. Maybe you’ll figure out how to get rid of me on the way.”
Every few days when the Graith was in Station, Aloê and a few of her friends had been meeting to watch the weather and drink tea. The Station was now ended and this was their last meeting.
It displeased Noreê that this meeting occurred in Tower Ambrose, which had bad memories for her. But she never let personal discomfort prevent her from doing what she thought of as her work. And the world’s weather these days was her work—a threat to the Wardlands even greater than a thousand Ambrosii, or so she feared. In any case, she knew she would spend very little time inside her body while that body was in Ambrose.
She stood now in the sky over the Sea of Stones, a thousand miles away from her body. Normally, visionary rapture so extreme would result in physical death. But her friends had interwoven their psyches with hers, and they stayed more firmly anchored to their bodies, barely in rapture. Their strength, their collective anchor, strengthened and anchored her voyaging mind. What she did now was dangerous enough, but something short of certain death. And it was utterly necessary.
She saw mostly by not seeing. Her vision in rapture was a perception of living things, or at least potentially alive things implicit with tal. But what she was looking for was death, the absence of life or the elements of life, a black river in the sky with many tributaries from all over the world.
Its source was deep in the north—all the way to the end of the wide world, or so she suspected. It remained tantalizingly, painfully just beyond her scope of vision. If she extended herself farther, still farther. . . . What was distance to the soul? Nothing.
But it was something to the body, and she knew that if her body and soul were not to part company she must not go farther; she must turn back. After a timeless time, contemplating the ice-dark river of death inundating the world, she did retreat.
There was a comfort in turning away from the stark smiling skeleton of the dying world, to cover herself with warm flesh like a blanket, to settle for being herself and only herself again.
She opened her eyes and met the golden gaze of Aloê, who smiled a slow, worried smile in response. “You took a long time to wake up.”
“I was. I was a long way away from myself,” Noreê replied, her tongue feeling as thick and about as flexible as a plank of wood.
Aloê rang for tea; it was brought by a beardless dwarf Noreê thought might be a female. She had a strong distaste for dwarves, but she strove to never display or act on that emotion. She thanked the server and sipped her tea in silent companionship with her fellow Guardians.
“Do you think it’s getting worse?” Aloê said, after part of an hour, at exactly the moment Noreê was ready to speak. Her intuition was powerful, subtle, enviable.
“Yes,” Noreê replied. “The world’s weather is growing colder. The life of the sun is being drained by something in the deep north.”
“Will the Wards protect us?” Thea asked.
“For a time. For a time. But there is something there, preying on the sun.”
“Someone will have to go and do something about that,” Thea said.
They all nodded and talked about the details of their separate visions.
Presently Thea looked out the window and said, “Your men are home, Aloê.”
“I only have the one.”
“Oh. Well, Morlock is with him.”
Aloê reached over to yank gently on Thea’s nose, then got up from the couch they were sharing to shout out the window at the men.
Noreê drank her tea with slow deliberation. She would have enjoyed talking with Thea and Aloê some more, but now she would leave as soon as possible. She disliked how other women, even fairly intelligent women, often became twittery in the presence of men. Not all women, of course, but Aloê and Thea were apparently not among the exceptions.
Now the heavy unmatched footfalls of the two men were ascending the stairs outside the room. Her cup was dry, the teapot was empty, and she had the distinct impression she had missed several remarks by Thea and Aloê. No matter. These brief fugues often occurred in the wake of extended rapture; everyone knew about them, and that knowledge might help mask her distaste.
Now the men had entered the room, and Aloê put her lovely mouth, lips like dark rose petals, on the scarred face of that pale, crooked man. Not perfunctorily, either, but hungrily, as if it were a half-baked pastry and she was going to eat it. Disgusting.
Naevros stood aside, a patient smile on his face, and waited until Aloê turned her golden gaze on him. Then he stood imperceptibly taller, smiled imperceptibly broader. If most women were fools for men, most men were equally foolish for women, even if they didn’t like them much. Noreê didn’t listen to what they were saying; it couldn’t possibly matter. These people had spent a century never saying what they really meant, until it wasn’t even necessary to say it anymore.