Aloê was listening in her mind to another voice, screaming, Love! You unspeakable trull! Don’t you see how he hates you? The voice was her voice, and she was trying hard to remember the face of the woman she had screamed at more than a century ago. It might be the same face as the Arbiter here in Big Rock. It might be.

“Not really,” said Aloê at last. “But I think we did meet at least once, long ago.”

Denynê nodded without much interest and stuck a thin bright blade into Earno’s dead white face.

CHAPTER NINE

The Lacklands

Deor’s food ran out within a day and they were thrown back largely on the resources of Morlock’s travel rations. They travelled eastward through the foothills of the Whitethorns, a meandering path that kept them well away from inhabited lands. But they saw little that approached game, except a few scrawny goats that were more trouble than they were worth to catch. So Deor declared after several hours of trying to catch one, anyway.

Mushrooms, however, were relatively plentiful, and Deor delighted in each different patch of fungus that he found. Kelat ate none of it, and even Morlock was (to Deor’s mind) surprisingly choosy. But in general the world seemed ill-stocked with foodstuffs.

“There is some hunger everywhere, and all the time, these days,” Kelat said. “The sea yields better food than land lately, but that means that too many people fish the waters.”

“Things aren’t so bad in the Wardlands,” Deor said.

Kelat shrugged. “I hardly remember it. That . . . that stone was in my head. In the wide world, it is so bad, and worse every year.”

Kelat thought that the best chance of finding Rulgân Silverfoot was in Grarby, a town full of monsters on the northeast coast of the Sea of Stones, where Rulgân was worshipped as a god.

“I remember it,” Morlock said. “Is Danadhar still there?”

“The God-speaker?” Kelat was surprised and impressed.

“He wasn’t the God-speaker when I knew him,” Morlock said. “But that was long ago.”

“He has been God-speaker as long as anyone remembers,” Kelat said dubiously.

Morlock shrugged and said no more.

Eventually they had to leave the foothills and travel south.

“We must be careful as we cross the River Tilion,” Kelat said. “The Vraidish tribes are settled there, and their Great King is opposed to any dealing with dragons.” He rubbed the side of his head ruefully. “I understand that better now, I think.”

Morlock said nothing to that either.

No one lived in the Whitethorns or their shadow, but when they turned south they found themselves crossing land that had been cleared and levelled for farming, woods that had been thinned by axemen harvesting the wood for building and fuel, roads that had been worn in the land by the passage of people and their goods from town to town. They saw all the evidence of human habitation except for the humans.

They came at last in the evening to a town built up at a crossing of three little roads. There was a market in the center of town; there were fetish poles for the Old Gods of Ontil; there were houses that Deor guessed were hundreds of years old—a great age for a dwelling not made by a dwarf.

All the windows were dark; no smoke came from any chimney; no word or footstep other than their own could be heard in the whole place. The town was dead; even the animals were gone.

“What happened here?” Deor asked.

“The world is dying,” Kelat replied. “The people went south, I guess.”

Morlock said nothing, but found a decent-sized house with a fireplace. No one felt like using one of the empty beds, so they lay in their bedrolls on the floor by the fire. They didn’t bother foraging for food, but made a thin meal of the travel rations from Morlock’s pack. For once, Deor did not complain.

They rose early and left the sad, hollow town behind them. They saw more during that long day as they walked. Toward evening they stopped in another, this one on a fairly wide roadway running from west to east.

“I think this is the Old Ontilian road to Sarkunden,” Morlock said.

“I think it may be the big road to Sarkunden,” Kelat agreed. “I don’t know who made it.”

“It’s in very good repair.”

“Well, it hasn’t had much use lately, has it?” Deor snapped.

Morlock didn’t answer, but started rapping on the wooden wall of what seemed to have been a sauna.

“No one’s home, Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.

“The wood is sound,” Morlock said, “and probably sealed against water.”

“What are you talking about, harven?”

“This walking is tedious and slow. Let’s make a cart.”

“And where are the draft animals who will pull this cart?”

Morlock grunted. “You’ll figure it out,” he said eventually.

Morlock started pulling the sauna apart plank by plank while Deor and Kelat ransacked the town and the nearby farmhouses for tools. The oddly shaped cart was done well before midnight; the dwarf and the master maker could work as well by coldlight as by daylight. But Morlock worked through the night at the village smithy forging chains of cunningly joined links. When Deor and Kelat awoke before dawn, Morlock was fitting the last pieces into place.

“What is this ugly thing?” Deor demanded furiously.

“Pedal-powered cart,” Morlock said. “Gears and impulse-wells to magnify our efforts. Steering oar is in back, as you see.”

“And I’m supposed to plant my stony ass on one of those bare boards and pedal you across the unguarded lands, is that it?”

“Refashion the seat as it suits you. We can find padding around town. Two of us will pedal while the third one steers. We’ll go faster this way, if the roads don’t get much worse than this one.”

“And if they do?”

“We’ll carry, push, or abandon it.”

Deor deftly bound up their bedrolls over the wooden seats, examined the wheels, gears, and chains, muttering prayers or imprecations in Dwarvish, and finally climbed aboard. “I guess we should pedal and you steer at first? Until we all get the sense of the beast?”

Morlock nodded and they climbed aboard, piling their packs in the fourth seat. Kelat climbed aboard more hesitantly.

“Is this magic?” he asked. “I have had bad luck with magic.”

“Just a new way to get work done,” Deor assured him. “We’ll earn every mile we make in this thing.”

They put their feet to the pedals and got under way.

Their way was downhill, more often than not, but when the undulations of the land led the road upward, Morlock released some of the stored energy from the impulse wells and also changed the gear ratios. In spite of that, a couple of times they had to get out and push the contraption over the rise. Then they had the terrifying delight of the long, steep ride to the bottom of the hill, impulse collectors grinding against the wheels all the way down.

The vehicle had its advantages; even Deor was forced to admit it. The worst thing about it was the jolting. It was impossible even to get used to it, as the jolt changed depending on the road surface and the grade of incline. But they were going much faster than they had been, speeding past empty towns, gray lifeless fields, cold green woods.

Deor would have complained a thousand thousand times during the day, but he held his peace so as to not alarm Kelat. His only audible protest was when he innocently suggested that their vehicle be dubbed the Hippogriff.

They rode the grumbling Hippogriff in the day and slept hard at night, despite their thin rations. They talked as they travelled—Deor the most; Kelat very little; Morlock least of all.

They had grown so used to dead fields and empty towns that they were surprised one morning to see long tangling pillars of smoke arising from a nearby hill. The buildings there were clearly occupied, at least in the center of town. That center was surrounded by a wall, stitched together with mismatched lumber repurposed from demolished buildings, or so Deor’s practiced eye told him.