he did of the Sea of Salt or this present freshwater sea.
'It is a dream,' said Lord Onosh.
Who was so fatigued that fragments of dream were ever spilling into his reality. Unpleasant fragments, for the most part. The heads of horses. Bloody blades. And -
Even as Lord Onosh sat there upon his horse, a dream reconfigured the world in fancy's fashion. Bloodred hairs sprouted from the glabrous glaciations of the lake. Oozing and creaming, a slow-headed slug in the fullness of its monstrosity -
The Witchlord dismounted from his rock.
'Wa,' said Lord Onosh, shaking the dreams out of his head.
Then, bootstep by bootstep, he crunched across the thin and narrow lakeside beach, his weight bearing down on smallstone and shellbreak. He kicked a stone into the lake, and was splashed for his pains.
'It is real,' said Lord Onosh.
It was real, and it was cold. The entire Swelaway Sea seemed one vast sink of cold. The lake was fringed with a lacing of frozen ice; and, indeed, knowledgeable geographers aver that only the underground upspout of hot volcanic water keeps the lake in its entirety from freezing to a single block of ice in the rigors of Tameran's continental winter.
The Witchlord Onosh took off the battle-gauntlets which he had worn for days. With his bare fingers, he picked up a fragment of ice. He held it up to the watery sun then discarded it to the water. The ice sliced into the water with a clean-slick splash.
Plunged. Then upfloated. Lord Onosh stooped to the water, cupped his hand, dipped for water, and drank.
'It is sweet,' said Lord Onosh. 'It is bitter cold, but it is sweet.'
Then the Witchlord filled a drinking horn with water and jangling ice, and passed it round that others might drink thereof.
The horn came last to Sken-Pitilkin.
'It is sweet,' said Lord Onosh, watching as Sken-Pitilkin drank. 'Sweet. Is it not?'
'It is, my lord,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Yet you have told me a thousand times if you have told it me once that the sea is not sweet but salt.'
'I meant not this sea, my lord.'
'Then what sea?' said Lord Onosh.
'He meant the true sea,' said Bao Gahai.
'The true sea?' said Lord Onosh.
'He meant that real sea of salt which girdles the entire world,' said Bao Gahai. 'This is not that true sea.'
'No?' said Lord Onosh. 'Then what is it? Something I have conjured from dream for my own self- delusion?'
'The Swelaway Sea is but an over-large lake, my lord,' said Bao Gahai.
'Lake!' said Lord Onosh. He looked across the waters. The distant horizon promised nothing but an eternity of water. 'This so large yet you call it a lake?'
He knew it, he had heard it, he had been told it a thousand times, yet in the face of the fact he found it hard to believe.
'The true sea is larger yet,' said Bao Gahai. 'In the true sea, my lord, there are storms which maul the shores and tear from the cliffs rocks which are larger than houses. In the true sea, my lord, the kraken uprises from the lurching depths, and swallows down ships in their entirety. In the true sea, my lord, there live birds which never rest but which fly eternally, born and dying on the wing. That is the true sea, compared to which this is but a little cup of nothing.'
Lord Onosh closed his eyes, squeezed hard, dismissed the visions Bao Gahai had conjured, then opened his eyes again. There lay the Swelaway Sea, gray and placid, a pool of ominous quiescence. Lord Onosh felt the gray eternities of water sapping his will, and had a premonition that he would die here. Not quick death clean, not death made battle-axe, but death made slow, death made a bone-picker, death dragged out over years. The Witchlord envisioned himself picking his way along the beach in his rags, picking his way in the wind and the rain, eating spoilt eggs half- formed into birds, eating the udders of rats and the bellies of worms, his very name in time forgotten by his own tongue.
He shuddered.
Upon the beach of that bleak and barren lake in the heartland of Tameran, there were shells of a bleached blue fringed with the last traces of violet. Lord Onosh had no name to specify the particularity of these shells, just as he had no name for the foreign waterbird which he saw briefing its way across the sky.
This was a place without language, a place of utter desolation.
'Yet rock is still rock and water still water,' said Lord Onosh.
'My lord,' said Thodric Jarl, interrupting the Witchlord's extended personal confrontation with the realities of the freshwater sea. 'My lord!' gray beard, gray hair, gray eyes – Jarl, unkempt and derelict after the rigors of the march, his features seamed with dirt and his eyes shot through with blood, why, Thodric Jarl right then looked like a very prophet in the grip of revelation. It was then the winter of the year Alliance 4307, and Thodric Jarl was but 27 years of age, yet such was the battering which this warrior had taken that he could easily have passed for 50.
'My lord!' said Jarl.
'Yes?' said Lord Onosh, squaring off against this fevered prophet, and bracing himself to receive commands from the gods, or a great diktat concerning the conduct of affairs amidst that living death which we call life.
'My lord,' said Jarl, 'I have for my lord's inspection the first spoils of our latest conquest.'
So spoke the Rovac warrior, solemnly displaying a double handful of water-snails for his liege lord's inspection.
For, after the initial silence which had struck the army as it contemplated the lake, Jarl had got busy with practical investigations while his emperor was still indulging himself in metaphysical despairs.
'We can eat these?' said Lord Onosh, making a dubious inspection of Jarl's wet and somewhat slimy trophies.
The Witchlord Onosh, disturbed in his moody philosophizing, tried to sound enthusiastic about the dripping molluscs heaped in the swordsman's calloused hands, though in truth he resented the brusque commonsense intrusion of this Rovac mercenary.
'Can we eat them?' said Jarl, half-echoing his emperor. 'One would presume so.' Then, as Lord Onosh turned back to the lake:
'One would presume they might make a very good meal, my lord.'
Lord Onosh saw that he was not going to be left alone to meditate on the derelictions of his fate. He was a lord of men, after all, albeit a lord of defeat, and such a luminary has certain responsibilities, even in the dampness of his extinguishment. Lord Onosh noted that Guest had made no move to give any orders.
'Zozimus!' said Lord Onosh, rousing his voice to the challenge. 'Come here! Come here, and pronounce upon on our scavenging!'
His chef came hurrying over to examine the spoils of Jarl's lake-plundering.
'This is the water snail Mabarakorabantibus Dontharpis,' said Zozimus, holding a sample to the light. 'Or so the beast is named in the Ilapatarginath system of taxonomy, though it is known elsewhere as the edible helmet. It is of wide distribution, and even occurs on the shores of the Araconch Waters, where Barglan of the Empire once made a notable feast of the things.'
Such was the loquacity of Pelagius Zozimus when he was showing off. It was truly amazing that the Witchlord Onosh stood still for such nonsense; and, indeed, to move from specifics to generalities, it is amazing how a mere slug-chef can always and ever so easily and so impudently command so much of the time of his lord and master, when a scholar can scarcely get a hearing at all. Zozimus commanded the Witchlord's time as if it was his by right; and Lord Onosh listened to Zozimus with the patience of a very rock.
Then:
'So,' said Lord Onosh, weighing one of Jarl's lake-morsels in his hand, 'we can eat these.'
'We can, my lord,' said Zozimus. 'Furthermore, the water weed which grows from the rocks is also edible.'
