Morlock grunted. “I’ll say my goodbyes now, then.”
“Shut your stupid face. When you go into vision, wait for me. I’ll establish a rapport with you, and we may be able to sustain contact while you pass beyond the world. If we do, I can draw you back.”
“Then.”
Morlock took Tyrfing in his hand and lay down in the snow. He looked at Skellar’s eyes, still glowing red beneath the lids, and closed his own. He summoned the rapture of vision.
Slowly, he felt himself rise from his body, his talic self a torrent of black and white flames. Tyrfing rose with him.
A non-word impinged on his awareness: he was aware of Ambrosia’s talic presence, a whirlwind of green and gold.
He ascended the Soul Bridge and followed it northward, into and beyond the sky.
Time was hard to gauge, so he didn’t. But the bridge grew more solid under his burning feet with each stride he took. That meant there was less matter, more tal. He saw designs in the stones, too—blocks of tal, they must have been, with a smear of matter.
The edge of the sky was like a curtain of darkness. The bridge went on and Morlock with it.
The tal drawn from the sun, from the sky, was all around him. He felt renewed, euphoric, as if he would live forever. He tried to fight the feeling, but it was stronger than he was. He drifted in it, a fire within the fire.
Then the river of tal was gone. All light was gone. He was beyond the world.
With his inner eye he saw everything but understood nothing. He was like a baby just entering the world. Forms had no meaning.
Then something stabbed him. That had a meaning.
He swung toward the threat and brought Tyrfing to guard. He tried to understand what he was feeling. It wasn’t pain: his body was on the other side of the sky. But it was a kind of suffering, and a kind he had felt before.
Before him he seemed to see a warrior made of light, armed with a sword made of mist. Then he remembered. He remembered the prison without walls in Tychar, the island surrounded by a lake of mist. When he walked into the mist it rendered him down, somehow . . . broke him up into the components of himself until there was no self anymore. It had been agony. He could not feel pain in his vision, but the distress of unbeing was equally bad.
He remembered the anger and shame he had felt as they had dragged him back to the island, to the prison, to himself.
He dropped the point of his sword and stabbed wildly at the shining warrior.
The warrior’s parry was late—perhaps he was surprised. Tyrfing’s point didn’t strike home, but its harsh blazing edge struck the warrior’s bright shoulder and rasped along it.
In his inner ear, Morlock heard a Guardian screaming.
Morlock withdrew to guard and thought.
What was this warrior? Who was this warrior?
He thought he knew. He remembered what Aloê had written in her letter—not to mention the letter itself. The Graith had used their link with the Sunkillers to send her letter to the end of the world, and they must have sent more militant aid by the same route. And who would they send?
It was Naevros—his talic self, anyway—that Morlock was facing.
Morlock held his sword athwart his talic self, then raised it high, then dropped it to guard—a kind of salute.
A fragment of time, and the warrior opposite did the same. He was Naevros. He must be.
And yet. . . . And yet. . . . The shining surface of the warrior, like plate mail forged from glowing glass, was unlike any talic avatar Morlock had ever encountered in vision. And the voice he had heard in his inner ear was not Naevros’. If he had to put a name to it, it would have been Rild of Eastwall.
Were the other Guardians there, in rapport with Naevros, protecting him somehow?
Was Aloê there?
He hoped not, but his choice was made. He dropped his sword to attack; the other parried and riposted with the blade of mist; Morlock circled away from the stroke and stabbed the shining warrior in the side.
A new cry of pain: Vocate Vineion, howling like one of his own dogs. Morlock thought he saw him briefly, peering in pain through the crack on the glowing glass plate.
Naevros spun, struck Tyrfing aside, and lunged. The blade passed through Morlock’s talic self again: he saw the black and white flames of his talic being fade into gray lines where the sword of mist had passed.
Morlock moved back and brought up Tyrfing to guard. Naevros pressed his attack and Morlock contented himself with defense for a while.
They had done the best they could bringing Naevros here. He was the greatest swordsman alive.
And yet. . . . He also thought they had made a mistake. A timeless time ago, when he left the world and came to this place that was and was not a world, he had been utterly bemused.
But a fencing match, a fencing match with Naevros in particular, that was something he understood: a long, coiling argument that ran back and forth with flashing swathes of rhetoric and sharp, pointed periods. He had done this. He could do this. He understood this. And it gave him time to ponder the un-world of these unbeings.
Why hadn’t they attacked him with weapons of their own when he came through the gateway in the sky? He saw them all around him, lattices of tal framing emptiness, moving about the coarse, invisible landscape, staying still, appearing and disappearing in irregular rhythms. He felt their malice and their hate; he heard many more of their thoughts than he understood, but he knew this fight between Guardians was important to them. But they made no move of intention against him, or to help Naevros.
Perhaps they could not. Perhaps the brawling, stabbing, clawing of material survival was so alien to them that they could not participate in it.
They needed Naevros to do their knifework, as Bleys and Lernaion had. Morlock wished he could speak to the man that had been his friend and his enemy, his mentor and his rival. He would have chosen to fight alongside Naevros rather than against him.
Then he remembered that Naevros had killed Earno. Blood for blood, life for life: that was law in the Deep Halls of Thrymhaiam, where he had grown, like a mushroom, in the dark. Naevros had placed his bet; he would have to stand the hazard of the cast.
For a timeless moment, peering past the shining warrior, his enemy, he saw the Sunkillers, appearing and disappearing in the dark lands beyond, and he understood something. They were enacting the passage of a higher dimensional object through a two-dimensional plane. In his mind, the various shapes of the object took solid form. Transfixed by fascination, he was nearly destroyed.
The sword of mist passed under Tyrfing and through the centrality of his self.
Death was near. He knew it, and his enemy knew it. He struck back with all the force his fading will could command, and several of the glass plates shattered in screams of pain. Past them he could see Naevros’ unprotected talic self: a coil of shining, steely lines. Morlock brought back Tyrfing as Naevros twisted the misty blade in his selfhood; he struck through the shattered plates, stabbing at Naevros.
Now it was Naevros’ pain he heard echoing in his mind’s ear. The misty blade withdrew: Naevros backed away.
Morlock watched wearily as the shining plates protecting Naevros began to reform. More Guardians were being drawn into rapport to protect Naevros. How many could they draw on? How many were party to the vile alliance with the Sunkillers? Most of the vocates, by Aloê’s account. He hoped she was not one of them.
He became aware of another being. Not the angular lattices of tal that composed the Sunkillers, and not the shining warrior of the Graith, no part of his own black-and-white talic emanations. This being was more like a rusty, dark stipple on the surface of the darkness, oozing like a serpent among the lifeless stones, nearly as lifeless as the stones themselves . . . but not quite. There was a smear of bloody light there, the merest trace of life.