by Larry Niven
“Uphill till Wavyhill talks. Go.” The Warlock slumped back. His breathing was an ugly sound.
Orolandes bent quickly and detached the skull and its harness from the Warlock’s bony shoulder. The decorated skull seemed a pathetic toy; there was no life in it. He tucked it under his arm and moved into the fog in a crouched and silent run. Nordik warriors would be answering that scream.
He had to find Mirandee.
The Warlock rested with his eyes closed. There were bruises and a wrenched shoulder, but it was years that crippled him now. Cold seeped into his bones.
Metal clinked. He opened his eyes.
Large magics had deserted him in this dead place, but at least one small magic remained. The gift of tongues was no big, showy sorcery. Some could learn languages with no magic at all. But the gift could be useful.
The Warlock spoke in Nordik. “Don’t kill me.”
The man in beaten bronze armor said, “I make no such promise. Are you such a weakling as you seem? How did you slay these my men?”
“The swordsman we hired to guide us slew them, then fled.”
“Describe him.”
If Orolandes was caught he would be killed anyway, the Warlock told himself. He described Orolandes accurately, and added, “He was the only one of us who knew how to find the treasure.”
“What treasure was that?”
“The god within a god,” the Warlock said. If they wanted the treasure they would capture Orolandes alive…maybe. It was worth a try. “Such a thing would be immensely valuable to us. We were all magicians save him.”
“How many are you?”
“Me, and a cripple named Clubfoot, and a woman named Mirandee.” And a skull. Pitiful, thought the Warlock. “We can’t harm you here.”
“I know. Stand up or I’ll cut your throat.”
It was a long and painful process, but the Warlock got to his feet. The man in bronze watched in disgust. “You’ll never walk alone,” he said.
He called, and two soldiers came out of the fog with Clubfoot between them. Clubfoot had a nosebleed. It seemed his only injury, save that he shambled like a man who had lost all hope.
“You may carry each other,” the man in bronze instructed them. “Do not delay me. You still live because you’ve not become a nuisance. Your swordsman is a thorough nuisance, and he will die.”
The white mist enclosed them still as they made their way downslope. The Nordiks seemed unsure of their path. Perhaps they were lost. It slowed them, and that was good, for the magicians were nearly killing themselves keeping up. Clubfoot was carrying half the Warlock’s weight. He limped heavily on his birth-mangled foot.
The first time the Warlock tried to speak to him, a spear shaft rapped his funnybone. It hurt like hell. The man in bronze armor said, “You must speak only in our tongue. We have no wish to be cursed.”
“Curses won’t work here,” Clubfoot said.
“We know that. We’re so certain that we won’t even bother to test it. Right?”
Clubfoot nodded. He was morose, tired, defeated.
The Warlock spoke to him in Nordik. “Good landing. I never thought we’d live through that.”
It seemed he wouldn’t answer. Then, “I just got us down where I could. I thought I’d done a good job till they showed up.”
“It’s still better than failing to fly down. Where are you on a cloud when the magic runs out?”
The leader was a big man, strong enough to wear bronze armor without noticing the weight. White showed in his beard, and an old scar above one eye. He hadn’t seemed to care if his prisoners lived or died…until now. Now he stared openly. “Were you actually riding on a cloud?”
“We traveled almost a thousand miles on that moving storm, thanks to Clubfoot’s weather magic.”
“What’s it like?”
The Warlock suppressed a sigh of relief.
Mirandee could stay free. Her special talent would protect her, even here. Orolandes? They’d have to hope, and hope hard, because the swordsman was carrying Wavyhill. But Clubfoot and the Warlock could only expect to be questioned, then killed. Unless they could trade on their novelty value.
“Picture the most luxurious bed you’ve ever heard of,” he said. “Not beds you’ve slept in, but beds from legend. Cloud-stuff is softer than that…”
Close behind him in the fog, a voice spoke to him. “Orolandes.”
He jumped violently. He kept his sword high as he said, “Mirandee?” They might have captured her already—
“No, I stayed clear of them. Barely. There’s a fog on my mind that’s worse than this around us. Which way is the nearest mountain?”
“What about the others?”
She shook her head. Her leather garments had suffered, but Mirandee wasn’t hurt; she didn’t even seem rumpled. “We can’t do magic here,” she said. “For miles and miles around it must be nothing but old battlefields. Were you thinking of rescuing them singlehanded? Or teaching me to use a sword?”
“What do we do, then?”
“We get out of this dead area. Uphill. If Wavyhill can lead us to the ‘god within a god’, we’ll just summon the others.” She took the skull in both hands; her hair brushed Orolandes’ cheek. “He doesn’t look good.”
“Was that a joke?”
She laughed. “Poor Wavyhill. Strap him to my shoulder, will you? Leave your arms free. No, I meant that he could be really dead. I’ll have to do the spells all over again…Orolandes? Do you remember Wavyhill’s true name?”
“Not offhand.”
That bothered her badly. “Try to remember. We can’t do a revival without Wavyhill’s true name.”
“All right. The wind’s that way,” Orolandes said, “and that was the way the cloud was moving along the mountains. North. So we go east.”
Orolandes didn’t like the touch of Wavyhill: dry, dead bone, and just a trace of the smell of death. He emphatically didn’t like strapping the skull next to the witch’s ear. “Why can’t we stow it in the pack? It’ll be safe enough.”
“Think of it as Wavyhill, our ally. The attitude is a large part of magic, love. He’ll live more readily if I’m here waiting for him to advise me.” She smiled at him, lovingly, and the skull grinned on her shoulder.
It became too dark to climb before they were barely started. They camped among half-seen trees. Mirandee’s small crystal ball had shattered in the fall, and they spent some time shaking shards and slivers of crystal out of the blankets and the pack.
In the night the fog turned to powdery snow. They wakened chilled despite blankets and bruised by the hard ground.
The chill dissipated as they climbed, but Mirandee tired easily. Her hair was white again. She drove herself hard. By noon they had climbed above the fog.
Mirandee argued for going straight up the nearest peak. But even if Wavyhill revived, they’d only have to go down again; it was not on their path to the hump-shouldered magical mountain. Mirandee gave in to his arguments, possibly with relief.
They went north and upward. They would stick to the ridges.
They had clean snow for water. They saw food, always receding at a good clip: a mountain goat, a small bear that shambled off although Orolandes shouted scathing insults at it. Orolandes wished for a bow and arrow, and settled for a stabbing spear made by using some of their rope to bind his sword to a straight sapling.
They didn’t talk much. Each had private woes which they suffered in silence…but Mirandee sensed her lover’s shame at abandoning companions. What with the closing in of her own mind, the loss of youth and magic, she suffered for two. Orolandes wanted to comfort her. He had no skill at it, but her empathy spoke for him.
So it went until, at sunset of the third day, Orolandes saw an elk. It would have been enough meat to feed a village, but to Orolandes it looked just right for two. He started toward it, prowling, trying to determine windage. The elk cropped the sparse mountain grass with an eye constantly lifted toward danger.
&nbs
p; Then, casually, it turned toward Orolandes and walked toward him, ignoring the grass, looking straight ahead…
To a hunter Mirandee’s voice was shockingly loud. “I’ve summoned it. Can you butcher it?”
The elk stood waiting for him to slash its throat. He did, feeling like a murderer. The sword cut through throat and spine with startling ease. The magic sword—
“I wish we knew its name,” Mirandee said. “As it is, we’re trusting someone else’s magic whenever we use that sword.”
She had a boulder blazing before he finished the gory job of butchery. Her hair was half black, half white.
And the decorated skull on her shoulder talked to them as they ate. “Magicians spend decades searching out each others’ true names, Greek. It numbs my mind that you could hear mine twice, and forget! No, Mirandee, I’m not going to tell you. Enough that the Warlock and Clubfoot can move me like a puppet. You would be one too many.”
“…biggest bird that ever lived. We thought they’d all gone mythical. Suddenly there it was, diving down on Mirandee.” The Warlock’s voice was thin and reedy, and he had to pause for breath…for air hotter than the atmosphere of Hell, that scalded his throat. It didn’t matter. They listened. “Claws like eight curved sword blades. Eyes the size of your shield, Poul…”
The sauna was a big underground room with a wood stove glowing in the middle. There were benches along all four walls, on two levels; and thank the gods for that, for the Warlock was on the lower, cooler level. He’d have been on the floor except that it would violate Nordik custom. The village held more than two hundred, and half of them were in this incandescent room, sweating enough to fill a respectable river. They were all stark naked: men and women, older children and people so old they couldn’t walk without assistance, and even some Frost Giant slaves, seven and eight feet tall, sitting on the lower benches with their heads near the ceiling.
The Warlock had seen strange peoples in his day. He knew how various were the ways of being human. He hid his surprise at sauna customs, and showed only the diffidence of a stranger who must be shown the rules. When Poul explained that they roasted themselves in this fashion to keep themselves healthy, he only nodded.
Clubfoot had guffawed when the Warlock told him that. (But they were alone then.) To the Warlock it was a disturbing sign of the times. Medicine was a branch of magic. Take the magic out of medicine, and what was left? This?
He wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t shown some discomfort. And it was stranger than strange, to see this many naked men and women crowded this close together, pouring sweat, and none of them so much as flirting! And every so often someone would bolt and run for the river downslope. Ten minutes later he’d be back, and if he brushed you in passing his skin was icy, as if he’d been dead for days.
Yet they were paying him a signal honor, and it behooved him to take advantage of it.
“Oh, Wavyhill was as evil a man as I’ve ever known. He killed whole villages, and not by coming on them with swords, but by stealth, by gaining their trust. He sold them zombie servants that were dead men from the last village he’d gutted, revived and hidden under the seeming of good troll slaves. One night the trolls would take up knives and…”
It had been very different three nights ago, when Harric reached Vendhabn Village with magicians as his prisoners.
Vendhabn was a place of stone houses with steeply peaked roofs and tiny windows lining both sides of a street of trampled dirt that curved like the cowpath it had once been. Houses of human scale, until you came to the great hall in the middle of town.
The Warlock was dopy with fatigue and sudden senility, and Clubfoot wasn’t exactly alert, but they noticed the hall. It was tremendous. The stone blocks that made it were tremendous. The door was eighteen feet tall, and built of whole trees…and it was old. He wondered if it had been built by Frost Giants.
The night was dark and still foggy. Nobody was about. That was good; the Warlock had dreaded being put on show for a japing mob. The bronze-armored man named Harric led them past the great hall and into what had to be a jail: a hut built to the same colossal scale as the great hall, a single room with a roof eighteen feet high, and more recent stone partitions dividing it.
Their tiny room had a small window in the door. The guard outside was a tall, gangling warrior with big knobby hands. The Warlock was too exhausted to speak, to do anything but flop on the straw bedding and try to keep breathing. As Clubfoot bent over him, hurting with the need and the impossibility of curing him by magic, the Warlock had gasped three words.
“Keep them entertained.”
Later that night he had awakened; but Clubfoot still didn’t know that. The guard and Clubfoot had been pressed close to the window in the door. Clubfoot had been telling the guard about lovemaking on a solidified cloud, exactly as if he had done it himself…exactly as his jealousy-fired imagination must have painted it. Certainly the Warlock had not been meant to hear.
In the morning he had felt stronger. He’d been able to eat some bread and drink some mead. Last night’s guard had seemed friendly enough, and a bit awed by his prisoners. Clubfoot had introduced him as Poul Cloudscraper.
The magicians talked quietly on the straw bedding. “We’d rather be guests than prisoners,” the Warlock said. “What are the chances?”
“Maybe. I talked to Poul last night. Blamed the killings on Orolandes. If they get him I’ll have to say I lied. I made out that we were kind of his prisoners.”
“If they get Orolandes we can cut our throats. I’d like to give the impression we’re taking their hospitality for granted. It just hasn’t occurred to us that they might cut a wandering magician’s throat—”
“Too late. I asked Poul about that. He can’t protect us. He’s a householder, but he only gets one vote in council.”
“Oh.”
“How’s this? You’re a loveable, trusting old man, and I’m your ex-apprentice who lives only to take care of you. It might stop your heart if you thought you’d been threatened by our hosts. Should anyone be so boorish as to raise the subject—”
“You insist that I mustn’t find out. Good. Help me up.”
Leaning heavily on the red man’s shoulder, he peered out the small window. There were men and women dressed too lightly against the cold, moving to avoid puddles and patches of half-melted snow. Two giant women went past with a dressed ox carcass slung from a pole. They were both very pale of skin, and white-haired, though they seemed young, and they stood seven feet tall or taller. The Warlock glanced at Poul, their big Nordik guard, and caught Clubfoot’s warning headshake; there was no good reason whatever to speculate on whether Poul was part Frost Giant.
“We need not mention our ally Wavyhill. Too macabre,” said the Warlock.
“Right. But tell ’em about the duel, it’s a good story.”
“Fine. So you’re the old man’s loyal apprentice, and you wouldn’t dream of deserting him in these his remaining years. Once they’re convinced of that they may loosen your tether. If you get the chance, you run.”
“No way.”
“I mean it. I’m out of the game. Here—” The Warlock slipped the silver bracelet from his upper arm. “This’ll point out the mountain. Mirandee will head there, and she’ll have Orolandes and Wavyhill.”
“Sure,” said Clubfoot. He was certainly lying. He helped the Warlock back to the straw to rest.
“We use the sauna once in ten days,” Poul Cloudscraper said. Poul was on an upper rack of benches. His impressively big feet were propped higher than his head, on a row of rails for that purpose. “We keep it only warm all the time. If one comes dying of the cold, we can warm him quick.”
“You certainly can.”
“Then again, the sauna brings on a quick childbirth. You would be surprised at how many children are born in the sauna.”
“Not at all. I’m about to give birth myself.”
Poul was concerned. “Shall we dip in the river again, or have you had
enough?”
The river had been icy; he had thought it would stop his heart. And now he was pouring sweat again. “I’ve had as much ecstasy as I can stand,” he assured the guard.
The cooling-off room was next to the sauna itself. It was crowded. The Nordiks would rest in here for half an hour, then leave…but today they weren’t leaving. As the Warlock washed himself he tried to hear what Clubfoot was telling them.
“None of us is old enough to remember what the gods are like,” the lame magician was saying. “Not even my friend the Warlock here. How did you like the sauna, Warlock?”
The Warlock smiled back. “A unique experience.” He accepted a towel from a silent Frost Giant woman. She used another towel to dry his back.
“There are some interesting legends, though,” Clubfoot said. “The god Dyaus-pita took a number of human women as lovers. Most of them came to grief. There was one who insisted that he show himself in his true form…which was probably a mistake.” The pleasantly shaped young woman next to Clubfoot was one the Warlock remembered: Harric’s younger sister. Good. If Clubfoot could pacify the bronze-armored warrior…
The time of the japing mob had come, of course. At midmorning Harric led them out. It was funny in a way, to see the villagers’ embarrassed reactions to Harric’s conquest: a cripple and a feeble old man. The magicians answered politely to some of the gibing questions put to them; they attempted to act like guests rather than captured freaks, and hoped that they would not therefore be taken for madmen. Harric put them back in their cell and went away angry, and the villagers went back to their tasks. The children remained.
There must have been a hundred children of all ages, maybe more. At first they only stared. The magicians began to talk to them. They gathered closer. Here and there you would see a younger one sitting on a teenager’s shoulders. At the back, a few white-haired, white-skinned boys and girls stood like trees among saplings, straining to hear, Clubfoot and the Warlock took turns at the window to tell tales of dragon fights, wars of magic, ancient kingdoms, strange half-human peoples…
