by Larry Niven
“We still have the habit of thanking the gods, mundanes and sorcerers alike. With reason. Before they died, some of the gods played at making other forms of life. Their creations were their survivors. Some live by what seems to be slow-burning fire…men, foxes, rabbits…and most plants use fire from the sun. Other plants and beasts use fire and mana both. We find unicorns surviving in mana-poor regions, though the colts are born with stunted horns, or none. But many mana-dependent peoples are going mythical: mer-people, dragons, centaurs, elves. Hey—”
Clubfoot did a strange thing for a man making a speech. He darted over to a boulder, heaved at it and turned it over. Underneath was a blob of grayish jelly two feet across.
In his youth the Warlock had killed carnivorous goo the size of houses. To a mere warrior they were more dangerous than dragons: a sword was generally too short to reach the beast’s nucleus. By contrast this goo was tiny. It was formless and translucent, with darker organs and vacuoles of food showing within its body. It arched itself in the morning sunlight and tried to flow into Clubfoot’s shadow.
“There! That’s what I’m talking about!” Clubfoot cried. “The goo are surviving, but look at it. Goo are named for the first word spoken by a baby. They’re said to be children of the first god: formless, adaptable, created in the image of the Crawling Chaos. We saw them smaller than a man’s fist in the desert, where the mana is poor. Do you see how small it’s gotten? Goo live by fire and magic, but they can use fire alone. When the world is barren of magic the goo will remain, but they’ll probably be too small to see.
“And we’ll survive, because we live by fire alone. But we’ll be farmers or merchants or entertainers, and the swordsmen will rule the world. That’s why we’re here. Not to save the centaurs or the dragons or the goo. To save ourselves.”
“Thank you. You’re very eloquent,” said Piranther. He seemed to have taken charge, with little challenge from anyone. He looked about at the rest. “Suggestions?”
Mirandee said, “What about your project, Piranther? Fifty years ago you were going to map the mana-rich regions of the world.”
“And I said that was self-limiting,” said the Warlock.
“And you called me a short-sighted fool,” Piranther said without heat. “But we carried through in spite of you. As you know, there are places human magicians never reached or settled, where the mana remains strong. I need hardly point out that they are the least desirable living places in the world. The land beneath the ice of the South Pole. In the north, the ice itself. The clouds. Any fool who watches clouds can tell you they’re magic. I know spells to render cloud-stuff solid and to shape it into castles and the like.”
“So do I,” said the Warlock.
“So did Sheefyre,” Mirandee said dryly. “The witch Sheefyre will not be joining us. She took a fall. Where are you on a cloudscape when the mana runs out?”
“Precisely. It was our major problem,” Piranther said. “There are places one can practice magic, but when the spells stop working, where are you? A desert, or an inaccessible mountaintop, or the terrible cold of the South Pole. But our search turned up one place of refuge, an unknown body of land in the southern hemisphere.
“Australia was probably infested with demons until recently. They’re gone now. All we have of them is the myth of a Hell under the world. But why else should the fifth largest land mass in the world have been uninhabited until we came? You know that when we finished our mapping project,” said Piranther, “I took my people there, all who would go. The mana is rich. There are new fruits and roots and meat animals. On a nearby island we found a giant bird, the moa, the finest meat animal in the world—”
The Warlock grinned. “Do I hear an invitation to emigrate?”
For a moment Piranther looked like a trapped thing. Then the bland, expressionless mask was back. He said, “I’m afraid we have no room for you.”
“What, in the world’s fifth largest land mass?”
“At the conference fifty years ago you said…what was it you said? You said that mapping mana-rich places only brings magicians to use up the mana. So—” Piranther shrugged delicately. “I take you at your word.”
They looked at him. He was hiding something…and he knew they knew…“I must,” he said. “The castles we raised by magic along the coast are falling down. The ambrosia is dying. We must migrate inland. I fear the results if my students can’t learn to use less powerful spells.”
“They’ll go further and further inland,” Mirandee said in a dreamy voice, “using the mana as they go.” Her face was blank, her eyes blind. Sometimes the gift of prophecy came on her thus, without warning. “Thousands of years from now the swordsmen will come, to find small black people in the barren center of the continent, starving and powerless, making magic with pointing-bones that no longer work.”
“There is no need to be so vivid,” Piranther said coldly.
Mirandee started. Her eyes focused. “Was I talking? What did I say?”
But nobody thought it tactful to tell her. Clubfoot cleared his throat and said, “Undersea?”
The Warlock shook his head. “No good. There’s nothing to breathe in the water, and the mana is in the sea floor. When the spells fail, where are you?” He looked around him. “Shall we face facts? There’s no place to hide. If we can’t bring the magic back to the world, we might as well give it to the swordsmen.”
Piranther asked, “Do you have something in mind?”
“An outside source. The Moon.”
Nobody laughed. Even the Greek swordsman only gaped at him. Piranther’s wrinkled face remained immobile as he said, “You must have been thinking this through for hundreds of years. Is this really your best suggestion?”
“Yes. Silly as it sounds. May I expound?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t have to say anything that isn’t obvious. Stones and iron fall from the sky every night. They burn out before they touch earth. Their power for magic is low; it has to be used fast, while they still burn.
“Some starstones do reach earth. The bigger they are, the more power they carry. Correct?” The Warlock did not wait for an answer. “The Moon is huge. Watch it at moonrise and you’ll know. It should carry enormous power—far more than the Fist carried, for instance. In fact, it must. What else but magic could hold it up? I suggest that the Moon carries more mana than the world has seen since the gods died.
“But you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?—Orolandes, is there magic in the Moon?”
The ex-soldier started. “Why ask me? I know no magic.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “All right, yes, there’s magic in the Moon. Anyone can feel it.”
“We all know that,” said Piranther. “How do you propose to use it?”
“I don’t know. If our spells could reach the Moon at all, its own mana would let us land it.”
“This all seems very…hypothetical,” Mirandee said delicately. “I don’t know what holds the Moon up. Do you? Does anyone?”
There were blank looks. Wavyhill’s skull cackled. “We could pull the Moon down and find we’d used up all the mana doing it.”
Mirandee was exasperated. “Well, then, does anyone know how big the Moon is? Because the bigger it is, the higher it must be, and the harder it’s going to hit! It could be thousands of miles up!”
“It must be tremendous,” Piranther said. “From Iceland and from Australia, it looks exactly the same. Nothing remotely as large has ever struck earth. Otherwise we’d find old records of it in the sky, records of a time when there were two moons.”
“We’ll have to give it plenty of room, if we solve the other problems.” The Warlock hesitated. “I’d thought of the Gobi Desert.”
Wavyhill said, “There’s even more room in the Pacific.”
Clubfoot made a rude noise. “Tidal waves. And we couldn’t get to it after it sank.” He tugged thoughtfully at a single braid of straight black hair. “Why not the South Pole? No, forget I said that. The
Moon never gets over the Poles.”
Piranther wore an irritating half-smile. “Basics, brothers, basics. We don’t know how big the Moon is. We don’t know what it weighs, or what holds it up. We don’t have magic powerful enough to reach it. You’re all thinking like novices, trying to do it all in one crackling powerful ceremony of enchantment, whereas in fact we need spells and power to reach the Moon, and study it, and learn enough to tell us what to do next, and finally to use that magic to tap the Moon’s power.” His smile deepened. “There is nothing in the world today that is sufficiently sacred to do all that. Warlock, you once called me a short-sighted fool. I will not call you short-sighted. Your daydream would be work for generations, if it could be done at all.”
The Warlock was not pleased.
“What exactly are you gloating about? We had the big conference fifty years ago. The power existed, then. But you and your group wanted to make maps.”
Piranther’s half-smile disappeared. His small black hand stroked the skin bag at his chest—and forces could be felt gathering.
“I know of a mana source,” said the skull on the Warlock’s shoulder.
Wavyhill saw that he had everyone’s attention. “I thought I had better interrupt while we still had a conference. I wish I could give guarantees, but I can’t. I may know of a living god, the last in the world. I’ll lead you to it.”
“I find this hard to believe,” Piranther said slowly. “A remaining god? When even the dragons are nearly gone? When half the world’s fishing industries are run by men, from boats, because the merpeople have died off?”
“It seems more believable when you know the details. I’ll tell you the details, and I’ll lead you to it,” said Wavyhill. “But I want oaths sworn. To the best of your abilities, when we have gained sufficient mana for the spells to work, will each of you do your best to return me to my human form?”
Nobody hurried to answer.
“Remember, your oaths will be binding. A geas is more powerful than any natural law, in a high-mana environment. Well?”
“I had other projects in mind,” Piranther said easily. “Your oath would claim too much of my time. Also, you have a much greater interest in the Warlock’s project than any of us.”
“Your interest isn’t slight,” said Wavyhill. “We who pull down the power of the Moon will rule the world.”
“True enough. But why should you have a head start on the rest of us while we fulfill your geas? Swear us the same oath, Wavyhill. Then we can all scurry about for ways to put you back together again. Otherwise we’ll wake to find you ruling us.”
“Willingly,” said Wavyhill, and he swore.
Piranther listened with his half-smile showing, while Mirandee and the Warlock and, reluctantly, Clubfoot swore Wavyhill’s oath.
Then, “I will not swear,” said Piranther. “Thus I presume you will not guide me?” He stood, lithely, and walked away. If he expected voices calling him back, there were none, and he walked away toward Prissthil.
“That means trouble,” said Wavyhill.
“We can do it without him,” said Clubfoot.
“You don’t follow me,” said Wavyhill. “I meant what I said. If we fail, there is no world. If we draw the power of the Moon, we rule the world. If Piranther follows us and learns what we learn, and if Piranther is there when we pull down the Moon or whatever, he’s the only one of us who can concentrate purely on controlling it.”
Clubfoot saw it now. “You and your stupid oath.”
“He’ll have serious trouble following us,” said the Warlock.
They climbed Mount Valhalla on foot: three magicians, two porters hired in Prissthil, Orolandes carrying a porter’s load, and the skull of Wavyhill still moored to the Warlock’s shoulder. Wavyhill’s eyes had been replaced with rubies.
He had hired the porters, he had chosen their equipment, but Orolandes had no idea why he was going up a mountain. He had asked Wavyhill, “Is the last god at the peak, then?”
“Gear us for the peak,” Wavyhill had told him, “and don’t think too much. Piranther can read your mind. He’ll be getting your surface thoughts until we can break you loose.”
The porters were small, agile, cheerful men. They did better than Orolandes at teaching the magicians elementary climbing techniques. They showed neither awe of the magicians’ power nor scorn for their clumsiness. To natives of Prissthil a magician was a fellow-professional, worthy of respect.
Clubfoot was a careful climber, little hampered by his twisted foot. But they were all aging, even Mirandee of the smooth pale skin and the white hair. On the first night they hurt everywhere. They couldn’t eat. They moaned in their sleep. In the morning they were too tired and stiff to move, until hunger and the smell of breakfast brought them groaning from their blankets.
It was good for Orolandes’ self-confidence, to see these powerful beings so far out of their element. He became marginally less afraid of them. But he wondered if they had the stamina to continue.
As the ascent grew steeper the packs grew lighter. Food was eaten. Heavy cloaks were taken from the packs and worn. But the air grew lean, and Orolandes and the porters panted as they climbed.
Not so the magicians. With altitude they seemed to gain strength. Here above the frost line there were even times when the rich creamy fall of Mirandee’s hair would darken momentarily, then grow white again.
It usually happened when they were passing one of the old fallen structures.
They had passed the first of these on the third day. No question about what it was. It was an altar, a broad slab of cut rock richly stained with old blood. “This was why the gods survived so long here,” the Warlock told Orolandes. “Sacrifice in return for miracles. But when the gods’ power waned in the lands below the mountain, the miracles weren’t always granted. The natives didn’t know why, of course. Eventually they stopped sacrificing.”
Higher structures were stranger, and not built by men. They passed a cluster of polished spheres of assorted sizes, fallen in a heap in a patch of snow. They glowed by their own light: four big spheres banded in orange and white, one with a broad ring around it; three much smaller, one mottled ochre and one mottled blue-and-white and one shining white; and two, the smallest, the yellow-white of old bone. Further on was a peaked circular structure sitting on the ground. It looked like a discarded roof.
Though Orolandes was still the master climber, this was evidently magicians’ territory.
There was no firewood on the third night. It was not needed. After they made camp the magicians—tired but cheerful, no longer bothered by strained muscles—sang songs in a ring around a sizeable boulder, until the boulder caught fire. Another song brought a unicorn to be slaughtered and butchered by the porters. Orolandes could only admire the porters’ aplomb. They roasted the meat and boiled water for herb tea on a burning rock, as if they had been doing it all their lives.
After dinner, as they were basking around the fire, Clubfoot said to Mirandee, “You know that I’ve admired you for a long time. Will you be my wife while our mission lasts?”
Orolandes was jolted. Never would he have asked a woman such a question except in privacy. But Clubfoot did not expect to be turned down…and it showed in his face when Mirandee smiled and shook her head. “I gave up such things long ago,” she said. “Being in love ruins my judgment. It takes my mind off what I’m doing, and I ruin spells. But I thank you.”
On the morning of the fourth day they came on a flight of stairs leading up from the lip of a sheer cliff. Aided by climbing ropes, they crawled sideways along an icy slope to reach the stairs: broad slabs of unflawed marble that narrowed as they rose, but that rose out of sight into the clouds.
Placed on random steps were statues, human, half-human, not at all human. Orolandes tried to forget, and could not, a half-melted thing equipped with tentacles and broad clawed flippers and a single eye. But there was a hardwood statue of a handsome, smiling man that Orolandes found equally disturbing, an
d for no reason at all. Magic. Here where men could not live because they could not grow food, magic still lived.
Snow and ice covered the rocks to either side, but no ice had formed on the marble. The stairway rose past strange things. Here was something shattered, a hollow flowing shape that must have looked like a teardrop flowing upward before it broke at the base and toppled. There, a single tree bore a dozen kinds of ripe fruit; but it withered as the magicians came near, until nothing was left but a dry stick.
And there, a section seemed to have been bitten out of the mountainside to leave a broad flat place. An arena, it was, where two sets of metal-and-leather armor stood facing each other in attack position, weapons raised, each piece of armor suspended in air. As the little party climbed past, the armor dropped in two heaps.
The Warlock stopped. “Orolandes, climb down there and get one of those swords.”
“I gave up swords,” said Orolandes.
“Maybe you won’t use it, but you should have it. Magic can’t do everything. None of us has ever used a sword…except Wavyhill.”
The skull laughed on his shoulder. “Much good it did me, then and now. Get the sword, Greek.”
Orolandes shucked his pack and clambered down and across the icy slope. At his approach the fallen armor stirred, then slumped. He chose the straight-bladed sword over the scimitar. It would fit his scabbard. It felt natural in his hand, but it roused unpleasant memories.
He was turning to go when he saw what had been hidden from the stair by a shoulder of rock.
Rows of thrones carved into the slanted rock face. Stands for the battle’s audience. On each of the scores of thrones a wisp of fog shifted restlessly.
Orolandes retreated behind his sword. Nothing followed.
Now the marble stairs above them were hidden by cloud, the banner of cloud that always streamed from the mountain’s peak.
The Warlock dismissed the porters, paying them in gold. Orolandes piled what was left in the packs into one pack, and they went on, up into the cloud.
