Read Online The Wide World's End by James Enge - Free Book Online

He seems like someone who would do almost anything for money.”
    â€œPossibly, but then he’d just move the body and any other evidence out of the house before the sale was complete . . .”
    Noreê waited for the Arbiter to complete the thought.
    â€œ. . . and then we could catch him at it!”
    â€œIt seems likely,” Noreê agreed.
    â€œThanks, Guardian. Ever think of joining the Arbiters?”
    â€œOften. Goodbye.”
    She had a bad feeling about the Arbiter—something would go wrong with her, or to her, in the near future. Noreê didn’t choose to know about it. She spoke to the donkey and it started up the town’s single street. Another word led the donkey to turn up a track leading to the Road.
    Money she did not need and could not use. It was others who paid—sometimes with their lives—when she met them. She was sorry for it, sometimes. But she did not do these things for herself; it was for the Guarded. So she told herself, not always quite believing it, as the donkey pulled the cart onto the Road and headed south, toward A Thousand Towers.
    Before she reached the city, a passing thain told her the terrible and wonderful news from up north. The Khnauronts were defeated, Thea was dead, and they spoke of Morlock Ambrosius like a king. Like a king.
    Thinking of a day in Tower Ambrose more than four generations ago now, the day Morlock Ambrosius had been born, she told herself, “I did what I could.” She knew that was true. And she added, “I will do what I must.” And that was true as well.

C HAPTER T WO
    Blood’s Price
    Grief is love. That’s the deadly thing about it. You cannot live with grief chewing away at your insides like a cancer. The pain is too great. No one can stand it. But to kill the grief, you would have to kill your love for the one you lost. That is a survival too much like death: to be alive, without love, without caring. Even if you could do it, you would not.
    It was fortunate, in a way, that Aloê had been wounded, and that some carnivorous Khnauront had fed from afar on her life. (That was what they told her had happened.) She hardly had the strength to live or grieve. She felt them, grief and the longing to live, felt them struggling within her, shadows fighting in the sandy emptiness of her heart, and it was all she could really feel. But she didn’t even feel that much. Her life was ebbing and she was grateful, in a dry, gray way.
    Morlock was often there. She sometimes saw Naevros, too, and Deor, and Rynyrth. Once she asked one of them, she could not remember which, where Thea was, and while they hesitated, she remembered and turned her face to the wall.
    And once she heard Morlock saying, “My life is hers. Take it all, if there is need.”
    And Deor was there, too, with his broad face made for laughing, but he wasn’t laughing now as he said, “And mine. Blood has no price!”
    â€œI won’t be a part of this!” said a third person angrily. Aloê didn’t know her. She was wearing the saffron robes of an initiate to the Skein of Healing, though. They were usually smiling, as if they knew some secret that you didn’t, but this woman was not smiling. The secret in her mind had turned unpleasant.
    â€œGet out, then,” Rynyrth said impatiently. “We don’t need you here.”
    â€œI cannot permit—”
    â€œLady, you stand on the western slopes of Thrymhaiam and I am the daughter of Oldfather Tyr syr Theorn. You do not permit me or deny me here. Go!”
    The lady in yellow left and Rynyrth turned to Morlock. “Do you think it will work?” she asked him in Dwarvish.
    As dry and empty as Aloê felt, she nearly laughed at that. If Morlock had made it, it would work. Whatever it was.
    Morlock said, “Unclear. The pattern has been renewed, and seems to be effective. But the trigger for the spell is the desire for life. If