A Guile of Dragons (7 page)

On the other hand . . .

Twelve years later he was still insisting that all would be well, but the insistence had grown a little weary. The night Morlock blew up his workroom, the insistence nearly gave way.

First there was the explosion itself. Tyr awakened groggily to the sound of glass trumpets and screams. He jumped from his nest as soon as he recognized the call. He hadn't heard it in hundreds of years, not since he was a child learning the words and songs from his father's father's brother, Oldfather Khust. But he had never forgotten it: it meant,
Dragons are attacking.

He threw a blanket around himself, ran out into the halls, and turned down into the corridor vomiting out the loudest noise. There he found Underguide Naeth presiding over a full-blown riot of his kin, screaming, “They're coming! They're coming! They're
here
!”

“Naeth, stop that noise and talk to me,” Tyr said. He did not raise his voice, but somehow everyone present heard him and fell silent, waiting for the Eldest's word. Fear of the ancient enemy was blood-deep in them, but loyalty was their bone.

“There is a fire, and the inner walls are breaking. That Other Ilk is part of it. I saw him there, basking in the fire like a dragon. I saw him.”

“Are you speaking of my
harven
son—your kin, chosen-not-given?”

“
I
didn't choose him. And—”

“But I did. His
ruthen
father saved our people from the Dead Corain before your grandfather was born. If you slander his-son-and-mine again, you will pay the price. I have spoken.” Tyr's right hand clenched into a fist before his chest.

Naeth bowed his head, abashed at the mention of his grandfather, a dwarf whose sons were all
harven coruthen
.

“Can anyone talk sense to me?” Tyr demanded.

“No,” said a brassy voice. “But I saw it. I can tell you what happened.”

Tyr's eyes focused on the downy-bearded dwarf who had spoken. A youngster—perhaps not even thirty. One of his maternal uncle's great-grandsons: Deor was the child's name.

“Tell me then, Deortheorn.”

The young dwarf bowed, flattered that the Eldest had remembered his name—but not overwhelmed. He started right in talking.

“Your
harven
son and Naeth had an argument about a seedstone he was working on. I didn't understand what they were saying, but I stayed around to listen because he never talks that much about anything, so I figured it must be important. Morlock, I mean: he's not one to talk. Anyway, Naeth dismissed us to the sleepbenches for the midnight nap, but I noticed Morlock get up and sneak off. I figure he's going back to work on his seedstone, so after a while I get up and follow him, because, you know.”

“You like to know things,” Tyr suggested.

“Right! Anyway. I was spying on him, I guess, so I didn't want him to know I was spying on him—”

“That follows.”

“—so I followed him, but not too close. Back to his workbench he goes, and he's talking to himself all the time in at least three languages, none of which was ours. He spent some time at his bench—I think he was inscribing something on the seedstone. When all of a sudden it blossomed.”

“The seedstone blossomed while he was at the workbench.”

“He was holding it in his
hand.
”

“Sustainer.” Tyr was envisioning a funeral and a very difficult letter he would have to write to Morlock's
ruthen
parents.

“It lifts him up—whoosh! like a tidal wave—and smacks him against the wall. There was a lot of fire and smoke. I tried to reach him, but it was too hot.”

“He's probably dead anyway.”

“Oh, he's not dead. I heard him talking to himself. He said something like, ‘How can I draw a shape without any lines? What if the ur-shape moves like water over time?' And other stuff I couldn't understand. Actually, I can't understand any of that stuff.”

“Hm.” Neither did Tyr, but there was no point in saying so. “Take me to him, or as near as you can.”

The young dwarf led the old one deeper into the earth, to a corridor filled with smoke that was slow to disperse. The air was hot, and as they came to the portal of the bachelors' workroom the blast was like a furnace.

“Eldest,” said Deor hesitantly.

Before the youngster could say anything more, Tyr said, “Wait here. If I don't come out with Morlock soon, go get Vetr and tell him what has happened.”

“Eldest—”

“There is a time for talking and a time for doing. I have told you what to do.” Without waiting for a reply, Tyr stepped into the burning room.

The pattern of the fire was wild—like snakes on the ground, like cracks in the earth. It was not spreading, except in one corner at the back of the room where the walls were crumbling as the fire crept up them, blood-bright ivy. The Eldest sidled along the walls of the chamber and avoided the worst of the fires. It was not as bad as cave-leaping over the lava rivers of the Westway underroads. Tyr had done that often in his reckless youth. Now he was not reckless: he never took a risk without a reason.

Soon he saw, through the red murk, his
harven
son hunching over something. He was holding whatever-it-was still on the floor with his feet, working on it with a diamond stylus held in his left hand. His right arm hung at his side, limp as liver-noodles—which the fingers of his right hand, in fact, strongly resembled: liver-noodles that had been smashed with a hammer.

“
Harven
Morlock,” Tyr called, when he had approached as close as he could. “Come here. We must leave this place.”

Morlock shook his head and muttered.

“There is danger,” Tyr insisted. “The walls are giving way.”

“I know! I know!” the boy shouted. “Unpatterning doesn't eat the fire, so I'm rescripting the pattern at the gemstone's core.”

“We can take care of that later. Your hand needs tending to, by the look of it.”

“There is no later. The fire won't stop unless I stop it. Shut up, won't you shut up? I have to hold the shifting ur-shapes in my mind!”

Tyr suspected the boy was irrational, although he found it hard to tell with Other Ilk in general and Morlock in particular. He thought about throwing something to knock the boy out and then dragging him out of there somehow. On the other hand, there was some chance that Morlock, crazy or not, knew what he was doing.

His decision was still taking form when it became irrelevant. The fire vanished with a kind of thunderclap. Tyr crouched, bracing himself against the icy shock that rode the air, re-echoing in the crumbling room. When it passed he looked up to see Morlock slumped against the wall. His right hand and bare feet were frost-blue.

There were still some small fires burning in the suddenly freezing room: Morlock's Ambrosial blood setting fire even to the stones it dripped on. But the terrible blaze was gone. Where its center had been, Tyr saw a small dark gem with a fiery red heart: the bloom from Morlock's seedstone, repatterned—whatever that meant. Tyr pocketed it and went over to Morlock. The boy's clothes and limbs were in rags. There was a medallion around his neck that Tyr thought he recognized. He looked at it solemnly for a few moments and then reached down and snapped the chain, putting it with the medallion in his pocket alongside the stone. Then he grabbed his bleeding, burning,
harven
son under the shoulders and dragged him away to the Healing Chambers.

Vyrlaeth was an unpleasantly lizardlike dwarf with a long gray tongue that he rested thoughtfully between his gray lips when he wasn't speaking— sometimes, even when he was. He shaved his face, and he knotted his hair like a female. But he was the best healer under Thrymhaiam, and Tyr was glad he was tending to Morlock.

“Yes, yes,” Vyrlaeth was saying now. “The burns are slighter than one would expect. The heritage of Ambrose. Indeed, the blaze must have been fierce to raise any blisters at all. Most troubling are the blast impacts on his hands and feet, and the frostbite here and there. You must explain to me sometime how the injuries occurred.”

“As soon as I understand it myself,” Tyr promised.

“Well.” The gray tongue glistened between the gray lips. A shrug. “It's the injuries themselves that concern me, of course.”

“Can you save his hands? He's a fine maker.”

“Oh yes. Yes, indeed.” The tongue again. “We will weave the bones, the blood vessels, the tendons and muscles together again. The flesh is wounded, but nothing has died.” The tongue. “Death itself is an interesting problem.” Tongue. “Not unsolvable. Partial death, anyway—tissue death. Necrosis . . . necrosis . . .” He whispered the word as if it were the name of his firstborn daughter.

“Can I speak to him?” Tyr asked, eager to escape from the sight of the healer's tongue and his sentimental daydreams of necrosis.

“Surely.” A gray smooth-skinned smile. “In his moods, he might even answer you.”

Morlock was lying on a stone sleepbench stripped of its blankets; there was even a stone pillow. The healers were taking no chances with the fires that might arise from Morlock's burning blood. Tyr couldn't blame them; the bandages on Morlock's hands and feet were smoking slightly, even though they were laced with so many fire-quell magics that they made Tyr's beard bristle like an unhappy badger.

He sat down beside his strangest son and said, “Morlock. I know you're awake.”

“How can I sleep, thinking about the ur-shapes?” Morlock muttered.

His moods.
Some of Morlock's
harven
kin thought him insane; Tyr had never agreed, and not just out of loyalty to the boy's
ruthen
father. Trying to trust that feeling, Tyr observed quietly, “I don't know what you mean by ur-shapes, Morlock. What are they and why are they bothering you?”

Morlock reached out his bandaged hands to take a stylus and slate from a stone table next to his rocky bed.

“Should you be using those?” Tyr asked anxiously.

“Vyrlaeth says it doesn't matter for the reweaving,” Morlock said. He paused and stared off into space for a moment. “Healing is a strange art. Bodies are so unclean. But the patterns are so complex. I think that is a making I will never master.”

“Ur-shapes,” Tyr reminded him, but Morlock had already turned back to his slate. The shattered, bandaged fingers sketched three elegant shapes with the stylus: a square, a circle, a hexagon.

“This,” Morlock said, “is three pictures of that.” He pointed at the coldlight lamp standing on the stone table.

“How so?” Tyr said. Although he thought he understood, he also thought it was a good discipline for Morlock to express his ideas in words.

“What if we were on the surface of the slate?” Morlock said after a while, “as flat as the slate itself, and could see nothing except what was on the slate?”

Tyr's eyes crossed a little; then he smiled and said, “Suppose we were.”

“Yes, and suppose the lamp passed through the slate somehow. This”—he tapped the slate—“is what we would see: not the true shape, but a series of sections. The square base. The round ring securing the light to the base. The long six-sided coldlight. We might think these were all different things, or that the object was changing shape over time, but it wouldn't be true. The true shape of the thing would be an ur-shape for us. We could deduce the true shape using our minds and memories, but we could never see it.”

“And you think . . .”

“I think we do live on a slate. Or maybe: in a box. There are measurements and dimensions that we don't see, and, and, and when those shapes pass through our senses we don't truly see them. We have to understand them. I am saying this badly.”

“No, I think I follow you. This is the scholium called
multidimensional geometry
”—he spoke the phrase in Wardic, as there was no exact equivalent in Dwarvish—“by those-who-know.”