Free The Wide World's End by James Enge Page A

difference wasn’t clear to a dwarf. It wasn’t always clear to her, even back when she was studying the arts at New Moorhope. She nodded.
    â€œThey opened up some of these dead Khnauronts, you see. Actually, I think they opened them all up. And the ones who died from not eating, well, they couldn’t have gotten any good from food anyway. Their innards or vittles, the parts that are used for nourishment—I don’t know what the Wardic word is—”
    â€œUse the Dwarvish one.”
    â€œTheir shykkump .”
    Aloê thought she recognized the word—it represented the tract from the gullet to the anus, if she wasn’t mistaken. She nodded.
    â€œAll that,” the dwarf continued, “was useless, and much of it was gone, absorbed back into the walls of the body.”
    â€œAll right. That is oddly disgusting.”
    â€œYes. They were dead from the moment they lost their lifetakers. Lernaion thinks that the ones who could still eat were just recent recruits—their shykkumpen would have dried up over time, too. But Earno thinks that it might have been a rank-marker, with the inferior Khnauronts slurping down soup, and the superior ones feeding off their tal .”
    â€œThey seem to be much at odds lately.” (She remembered: They will make that crooked man king someday . And: Shut your lying mouth .)
    â€œThe summoners? Indeed. I could almost wish that Bleys were here to step in between them. But the downside would be. . . .”
    â€œThat Bleys would be here, yes.” The oldest summoner was loved by few, if any, of his fellow Guardians.
    Deor took her to see the captive Khnauronts, in an open field on the far side of the camp. They lay or sat each one alone, and Aloê thought she could see the faint imprint of something unseen in the pale, dry grass around them. Some were sitting upright with folded hands. Others held bowls of soup in their hands, lowering their faces to the liquid and slurping it up like animals. Yet others lay staring at the sky or sleeping.
    The field was ringed with spear-armed, gray-caped thains. At a near corner, she saw the Summoner Earno, his legs crossed, his eyes glowing with rapture. Far off, across the field, she could barely descry another white-mantled figure: Lernaion, she supposed.
    The wet succulent sounds of slurping were the only ones in the moonlit field.
    â€œDo any of them talk?” she asked Deor.
    â€œThey can’t!” Deor pointed to his throat. “No, um, vyrrmidhen .”
    â€œNo larynxes.” How did they communicate with each other? Did they not communicate at all? It was strange indeed. “They will have to be examined on the Witness Stone.”
    â€œSo the summoners say.”
    Aloê’s stomach moved audibly within her.
    Deor glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. “Queasy?”
    â€œHungry,” she admitted. The sounds of the soup-sucking ghouls were indeed disgusting, but the smell of the broth drifting through the cold air was like a breath of meaty heaven.
    â€œGod Avenger strike me dead.”
    â€œAvert!” she said automatically. “But do you suppose . . . ?”
    â€œOf course! The Guardians, the Gray Folk, the Silent Folk all have refectories set up. Or we could go under Thrymhaiam.”
    â€œNo . . . I should return up the hill to—” Morlock “—the sleephouse.”
    â€œCome in here. We’ll get you something better than soup.”
    She found herself sitting on a long bench, eating some sort of roasted bird and the most delicious bread since bread was invented. The rest of the hall was dark, and Deor sat beside her, talking cheerily of this and that, eating roasted mushrooms and drinking wine. He persuaded her to drink some of the wine, and the drink might have been a mistake on her part. She was already weary, and the wine sent her right to the edge of sleep. She had little flashes of awareness as