“I’m not a drunk.”
“Excellent. Perhaps you’ll join me in a mug or two of wine? I usually partake around this hour.”
The stranger stepped back through the dark doorway behind him and motioned for Morlock to follow.
The stranger didn’t look dangerous. After a moment’s thought, Morlock sheathed his sword and stepped through the doorway.
The interior of the stranger’s house was an image of chaos: books and stones and papers and dust lying around in heaps. On one of the stone heaps was a jumble of bronze pieces that looked like parts of a skull. The room was lit, not by a lamp but by a kind of window set into the wall. But there had been no window on the wall outside, and this window showed no scene that could be local. It showed a green field in early summer or late spring; there was a large maple tree with some ropes hanging from it. Morlock would have liked to know how the window was made.
The stranger was busying himself in a cupboard and he brought back a couple of mugs filled with reddish fluid that smelled like it might be wine.
“Not very good,” the stranger said ruefully. “But the best you’ll find in town, I’m afraid. Any grapes they’ve managed to grow recently they kept for eating.”
Morlock raised the mug and said, “I’m Morlock Ambrosius, by the way.”
“Are you?” The stranger’s vague blue eyes focused on him. “Interesting!”
“What’s your name?” Morlock asked.
“Don’t you know it?”
“No. Have we met?”
“I can’t remember. You can’t remember all the people you’ve met, can you? I expect someday you’ll forget you’ve met me today.”
“We have not met yet. Formally, that is.”
“What? Oh, my name. I suppose you could call me Angustus. Some people do, around here.”
Morlock nodded. He was used to people who travelled under pseudonyms, although he tended not to trust them. On the other hand, this fellow had more or less admitted the name was not his own. Maybe that showed he was honest after all.
“Are you a maker, Angustus?”
“No. No. No. Not really. No. I’ve never thought of myself that way. Although I suppose I am, sort of. But I teach at the local lyceum, at least on a temporary basis. I know a good many curious things, although it’s not clear that they’ll be any use when the sun goes dark. Of course. . . .”
“What will?”
“Exactly. Nunc est bibendum!” Angustus lifted his mug in salute to Morlock and took a drink. Morlock did the same. The wine was pretty bad, but better than nothing.
“That was Latin, wasn’t it?” Morlock asked Angustus, after they had been drinking in silence for a while.
“It was indeed. Loquerisne Latine?”
“A little. One of my fathers made me learn it.”
“Well, I commend him for it. There’s not much call for it on the northern plains, I’m afraid. I teach logic, rhetoric, geometry, Old Ontilian—whatever they’ll pay me for.”
“There’s a living in that?”
“I don’t remember saying so. Now if I could teach people how to play venchball I’d have it made. The venchball trainers eat custard every night, as the saying goes. The stadia are crowded on game days, and on other days everyone seems to be talking about the next game or the last one.”
“Don’t know the sport. It’s entertaining?”
“I’d rather be fried in oil than sit through a match. No, on game days I usually go into rich people’s storehouses and steal their food.”
“Eh.”
“I sense your distaste, and to some extent I share it. On the other hand, a man has to live and times are hard.”
“I suppose.” Morlock thought of the Khnauronts’ invasion of the Wardlands. He shrugged and drank again.
“How would you go north from here—if you had to go alone?” Morlock asked Angustus.
The other shook his head. “I? Would not go. Singly or in bunches. You realize that northeast of here is the dreadful city of werewolves Wuruyaaria?”
“I’m not worried by werewolves.”
“If you’re not worried by a city of werewolves slowly dying of starvation, I suppose there’s no point in even mentioning the riptide of superpredators fleeing south in search of meat, the desperate gods afraid of losing their worshippers, the ice-monsters that rule the bitter northern edge of the world, or the Sunkillers from beyond it. So I won’t.”
Morlock had already met some of the gods and he took monsters on a case-by-case basis. “Who are the Sunkillers?” he asked.
Angustus pointed at the ceiling. “The guys who are doing that. Killing the sun.”
“What are they like?”
“I’ve never met one. Not to my knowledge. A lecturer at the Lyceum has a theory that they are colonists, making the world habitable for their form of life. Another thinks it’s pure malice.”
“How do you know it’s not a natural phenomenon?”
“Direct contact in rapture. Some of the seers didn’t make it back to their bodies alive, but enough did that we know this is being done to us.”
Morlock nodded thoughtfully and drained the last of his wine. “I know someone who says . . . it’s a kind of idealism. They are opposed to biological life in principle.”
“Idealism is often incompatible with life,” Angustus agreed cheerily. “You may not see it that way. But as a fat, middle-aged man, I think there’s a lot more to be said for kindness than correctness.”
“I’m well into my second century of life, Angustus.”
“Yes, the Ambrosii live long, they say. But you have the restlessness and impatience of a young man—the belief that you can change the world, or save it, at least.”
Morlock shrugged. “I am not impatient.”
Angustus smiled into the dregs of his wine and did not respond directly. “No, I would not walk north from here for any reason. If there were some way to fly, I might try that: I’d like to have a conversation with one of these Sunkillers. But I suppose flying is impossible. That’s what they say at the Lyceum. Something about wingspans and weight ratios.”
“What about dragons?”
“Dragons are mythical. Would you like some more wine?”
“No,” Morlock said. He could still fell the bitter metallic burn of the stuff in the back of his throat.
“It’s good to know when to stop,” Angustus said agreeably, and gathered Morlock’s cup from him.
The time to stop was before you began with the kind of rotgut Angustus served out. But Morlock reminded himself that the stranger had shared with him in a time of scarcity and he said, “Thanks for the drink. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Maybe. But I’m thinking of getting out of town. Things are getting weird around here.”
“I thought you said that there was no point in going south?”
“There are more directions than north, south, east, and west.”
Morlock nodded. “I suppose so. Good fortune to you.”
“And to you.”
Morlock found himself walking down a narrow street of dark wooden houses. He hardly took note of what his eyes were seeing. Something the stranger had said was taking root in his imagination. In his mind he was seeing a dry leaf dancing in the hot air above a campfire.
CHAPTER THREE
To Market, To Market
When Morlock fell into the air and vanished, Ambrosia grabbed Deor and Kelat by an elbow each. Almost as rapidly, she ascended into rapture and entangled her tal with theirs. In the next instant, the air swallowed them and spit them out on another patch of ground. But they travelled together, as they might not otherwise have done.
They hit a patch of frozen turf in the same instant, and she released her grip on the others in time to keep her own elbows from being twisted to the breaking point.
“What did you do?” Deor shouted, rolling to his feet.
“Kept us from separating,” Ambrosia growled, climbing to her own feet. Kelat was already standing but she ignored the hand he was offering her. “Maybe,” she admitted after a moment.