The thief was a young woman in an academic gown. Her face was thin and grayish, her eye-sockets shadowed with dark green, like old bruises. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I was just so hungry. And there’s a teacher at the Lyceum who says it’s all right to steal if you’re hungry.”
“Only if you get away with it.” Morlock let her go and recovered his mushrooms. When he looked up, she was still standing there, looking sadly at his basket packed with food.
Morlock was strongly opposed to theft, and he damned Angustus in his heart for setting children like this on a path they were utterly unprepared for. How many had ended up in jail or worse?
“I need the food,” he said harshly. Then on impulse he took a bag of gold and tossed it to her. “This should buy you something.”
She opened the bag, looked at it suspiciously. “Why are you giving me money rather than food?”
“I can’t make food.”
“That implies you can make gold.”
“Eh.” Morlock walked away.
There was a draper’s shop on his way and he went in and bargained for some ulken-cloth, to be sent to his camp south of the city. It was surprisingly cheap, compared to food, but he did need a lot of it, and the deal diminished his stock of gold considerably. He went back to his camp and secured his food in the wilderment there.
He turned to face the thin-faced scholar who had followed him all the way back.
She said nothing to him, so he said nothing to her. He turned away and went down the bluff to the banks of the River Nar.
He pulled sheckware buckets from a sleeve pocket, unfolded them, and filled them with yellow mud from the river. He hauled the buckets up the bluff to his campsite.
The young scholar was sitting nearby, resting her chin on her knees.
Morlock shrugged, dispelled his occlusions and wilderments, and set about his business. He made a fire, unpacked the portable forge the dwarvish makers of the Blackthorns had given him, and while he was waiting for it to rise to a useful temperature he had a drink of that mushroomy beer that the dwarves were fond of. Morlock was not fond of it, but he did feel that any drink was better than none.
“Master,” said the scholar tentatively.
“I am not your master.”
“What’s your name? Mine is Varyl.”
“My name is my business.”
“Are you about to make gold?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“May I take notes?”
Morlock thought for a moment. He did some math in his head, the primitive math of economics. He almost said no to her. Then he thought of those plump, red-faced, student-hating teachers in the stationer’s shop. “Eh,” he said aloud.
She took this as permission and pulled a tablet and stylus from pockets in her gown.
He ended up calling her over to the forge and explaining a few things to her. Raising the mass to equal the appropriate volume of gold involved a transition through a higher space, and he was concerned that she might not be able to follow it. But it turned out that she knew a good deal of metadimensional geometry. By the time his gold was cooling next to the forge, she had pocketed her tablet and was wandering away, chewing thoughtfully at her stylus.
Morlock never saw her again. But the next day when he went down to the market to cheapen some thread, he found that the price of food had doubled overnight. Many of the buyers were hollow-cheeked young people in academic gowns who seemed to have plenty of gold.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Flight of the Viviana
The round-faced man had been weeping: the marks of tears still gleamed on his cheeks, but his voice was carefully even as he said, “I’m talking about the mansion on the bluff north of town—the one with the beautiful view.”
“Yes,” said the hard-faced butcher, “and I’m talking about a full-grown ylka-beast on the hoof—enough to feed a family of four through a cycle of Trumpeter, if they’re thrifty and are fairly fond of soup and organ meat.”
“But I paid three thousand shields for this place last summer! I have a lifetime of savings in gold—”
“This is this summer. It’s today. I wouldn’t let a piece of offal out of my shop for all the gold coins in the twin cities. Straight-up trade: the beast for the property’s deed. Do we have a deal, or shall I call back Master Dinby?”
“Deal,” said the round-faced man glumly. “Can you have someone bring it to my house on Shull Street?”
“Delivery is extra.”
The round-faced man considered this briefly, and then he leaped at the butcher, flailing with his linen-gloved hands and his silk-shod feet. The butcher, surprised, went down in front of his shop. The round-faced man was simultaneously screaming and gnawing at the butcher’s wobbly neck. The resulting sound was a strangely shrill burping or farting effect. But the sight of a butcher being attacked swiftly drew other people into the fray: some defending the butcher, some more intent on getting a kick or a punch in, and still more trying to loot the butcher’s stop, in spite of the armed guards within. People were rushing toward the fight with wheelbarrows of gold; they were rushing away with wheelbarrows of bloody meat; there was screaming and pleading and somewhere, unseen but heard, a chorus of women was chanting a spell meant to rekindle the dying sun.
“I was worried about trying to sneak a werewolf through town,” Ambrosia remarked to Deor as they walked carefully around the fringes of the riot. “Now, not so much.”
“I thought you said Narkunden was the orderly place,” Deor replied.
“It was. You never saw so many laws and regulations. I wonder what can have happened?”
They trudged through a drift of gold-dust. Someone had been carrying it in bags that had come apart. No one passing by was even bothering to pick it up.
“Morlock may have been in town for several days,” Deor observed when they were past the drift and into a quieter street.
“Yes, but he can’t have. . . .” Ambrosia’s voice trailed off.
“Several days,” Deor reminded her.
She shook her head, not quite as if she were disagreeing.
They sneaked through the tangling streets of south Narkunden, climbing steadily higher until the buildings petered out and they passed beyond the city. There was no need for walls there, since the Narkundans feared no incursion from their trading partners to the south, the dwarves of the Endless Empire.
In the ragged field south of town was a fire; beyond it, Deor thought he could detect an occlusion well-hidden by wilderments. To the left of the fire was an odd framework, clearly a work in progress, and many bolts of ulk.
In front of the fire was Morlock, lying supine on the ground, his eyes faintly glowing in rapture. Overhead a cluster of ulken bags, strangely shapeless, floated in midair.
“Morlock,” Ambrosia said drily, “if you can attend to what I say, please join us in the merely material realm. If need be, I will ascend into rapture and drag you back down.”
Morlock raised one hand. The light filtering through the thin skin of his eyelids slowly faded. He sat up.
“I have approximately ten thousand questions,” said Ambrosia with a dangerous tone in her voice. “If you respond to any one of them with, ‘Eh,’ or a grunt, or a shrug, then one of us will go down the dark canyon of death before the ailing sun sets.”
“Eh,” said Morlock predictably.
Ambrosia let him live, possibly because she had not actually asked him any questions yet, and in the end she got her answers.
The floating ulken bags were, not surprisingly, floating ulken bags. Morlock’s cunning plan was to build a big sort of basket, fill it with the ulken bags, cover the basket with more fabric, and float all the way to the end of the world.
“What keeps those things in the air?” Ambrosia said.
“Air’s hot,” Morlock said.
“But it doesn’t stay hot,” Ambrosia said. She pointed at the babble of gasbags, even now sinking toward the ground beside the fire.