Kage Baker - The Anvil of the World

He fell silent. Smith drank more wine, remembering.

“Have you ever been in love like that?” Willowspear inquired at last.

“Not really,” said Smith. “I never stayed anywhere long enough. My mother died when I was a baby, so… my aunt’s family took me in. And I had to work for my keep, so I was apprenticed out young. And one night I was coming back from delivering an order and … some thieves jumped me. I killed all three of ’em. Standing there with bodies all around, scared out of my wits at what I’d done. So I ran away to sea. And later I was in the army. And later still •… so, I was never any place to meet the kind of girl you settle down with. Lots of women, but, you know … you both just get down to business. It isn’t especially romantic.”

A silence fell. Finally, Smith said, “You could go home. I could go on and rescue the lady. I haven’t got as much to lose, and I’m better with weapons.”

“I don’t doubt that,” said Willowspear. “But what would my mother say, Smith?”

“You think Fenallise would miss me?” Smith blinked. It had never occurred to him.

“Of course she would,” Willowspear replied. “And I am still bound by honor. Lady Svnae’s Mother raised me, Smith. She guided me on the path that brought me to my own mother and my wife. If Her daughter is in danger, how can I walk away?”

“I guess you couldn’t,” Smith agreed.

“It may even be,” Willowspear said dreamily, “that this is a quest, and She means me to travel on. She knows the journey of each star in the heavens, and all the journeys of the little streams to the great sea; and each man’s path through life, She knows, Smith. Even yours. Even mine.”

A hollow voice spoke out of the darkness.

“You won’t leave off worshipping her, will you?” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Give me some of that wine.”

“Yes, my lord.” Willowspear propped him up. Smith tilted the bottle. Lord Ermenwyr drank, and settled back with a sigh.

“ ‘Yes, my lord,’ he says. Why should I be your lord? All my life, even when I was a snotty little thing in long clothes, there you were all big-eyed watching my family like we were kings and queens,” said Lord Ermenwyr hoarsely. “You and the servants. Yes, my lord, Yes, Master, Kneel to your Lady Mother! All her damn disciples climbing our mountain on their knees, expecting her to solve all their problems for them!”

“But She always did,” said Willowspear.

“That’s the worst part,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “She does. You know what it’s like, growing up with a mother who knows everything? You, you look in her eyes, and you see—everything you really are—”

He went into a coughing fit. Willowspear scrambled away, returning unsteadily through the darkness with his medicine kit and the box containing Lord Ermenwyr’s medication. He drew a sealed glass jar from the kit and gave it a vigorous shake. To Smith’s astonishment, it at once began to glow with a chilly green light.

“I thought you couldn’t do magic,” he said.

“I can’t,” Willowspear replied. He fitted a medicine cartridge into the hummingbird needle and gave Lord Ermenwyr an injection. “Have you ever seen a phosphorescent tide? It works on the same principle. Lie still now, my lord.”

The lordling subsided and lay breathing harshly, looking even more like a corpse in the unearthly light.

“Oh, put it out,” he demanded. “I want to sleep.”

“At once, my lord.” Tight-lipped, Willowspear set the jar in the box and closed the lid.

“And you can just get that look off your face.” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice floated out of the abrupt darkness. “You know I have insomnia. Did you know that, Smith? Chronic insomniac, ever since I was a baby.”

“Really.” Smith lay down again, drew up his blanket.

“Nothing helped but sleeping with Mother and Daddy. I hated the night nursery. Eyrdway came and took horrible shapes at the foot of my cot, until Svnae got up and hit him with her wooden dragon. I ran out the door, down the long dark halls, right between the legs of the guards. I scrambled into bed with Mother and Daddy.

“Daddy growled, but Mother was ever so gentle in that ruthless way of hers and explained I couldn’t stop in their bed, but she’d take me back and stay with me until I was asleep. The servants made her up a bed by my cot. She told me we were going to go to sleep. I closed my eyes tight, but I could hear my heart beating, and that always scared me, because what if it stopped?

“So I opened my eyes at last. Mummy was asleep.

“And I thought: Mummy knows everything, even Daddy’s servants say so, and she is all the Good in the world. And she’s asleep. What happens to the world when Good sleeps?

“I’ll bet you never wondered about that, did you, Willowspear?”

“No, my lord, I never did.” Willowspear sounded exhausted.

“Well, I did. I’ve been scared to sleep ever since.”

“My lord,” said Smith. “We’ve got hard work to do tomorrow.”

A sullen silence fell, and remained.

Once or twice there were screams in the forest, brief ones. Smith told himself it was animals, and went back to sleep.

He was cautious when he crawled out in the dawn, all the same.

“Child of the Sun.”

Smith met the gaze of six pairs of red eyes, at the level of his own before he swung himself over the rail and dropped to the ground. He nearly landed on a motionless body, and staggered back; but it was only a wood deer, or had been, for its head had been torn off and it had been clumsily, if thoroughly gutted.

“We hunted,” said Cutt. “Now our master can have broth.”

“That was a good idea,” said Smith, looking up at Cutt. He gaped as he saw the single green dart that protruded from between Cutt’s eyes. “Hold still.”

Very carefully indeed, he reached up and pulled the dart out. Cutt made a strange noise. It was something like a deep note played on a bowstring, and something like the distant boom of ice breaking in polar seas.

“We hunted,” he repeated, in a satisfied kind of way.

By the time the sun had risen above the trees, it looked down on the Kingfisher’s Nest inching its way up the portage trail on the massive shoulders of Cutt, Crish, Clubb, Stabb, Strangel, and Smosh, preceded by Smith and Willowspear hacking madly away at the nearer edge of the forest canopy to make them room. Smith had only the kindling hatchet and Willowspear the largest of the carving knives from the galley, so the work was not going as quickly as it might have done.

Nevertheless, before the sun stood at midday they had arrived at the top of the bluff, sweating and triumphant, and by afternoon the Kingfisher’s Nest was clanking away upriver at last. Her owner, who had made the whole remarkable journey in his bunk, fastened in with sheets like a dead chieftain in a particularly splendid tomb, was sound asleep and hence unconscious of his good fortune.

But he was sitting up in bed and smoking by the time Smith moored that evening and went below.

“Well done, Smith,” he called cheerily. “I must remember to buy you a nice big shiny machete of your very own when this is all over. One for Willowspear, too.”

“So you didn’t die again, eh?” Smith leaned against the bulkhead. His arms felt as though he had been hammering steel all day. “Great.”

“Must be all this damned fresh air,” Lord Ermenwyr said, and blew a smoke ring. “Our humble servant Willowspear actually handled meat to prepare me a cup of broth, can you believe it? And he grilled the ribs of whatever-it-was for you. They’re in the kitchen.”

“Galley,” said Smith automatically.

“In the covered blue dish,” Willowspear called.